Cubox? Linux 3.7 released, bringing generic ARM support

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:13:12PM -0500, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> The Cubox SoC is a ARMv7 instruction set, which means it has a
> mandatory hardware floating-point unit. It's also why Ubuntu works
> on it as Ubuntu's developers have choose only to support ARMv7
> architecture and above.

The main reason for ARMv7 is that it supports thumb2 instruction set.
That reduces code size, saves memory bandwidth and cache, which helps
performance.  ARMv6 does almost everything ARMv7 does, but not thumb2.

> The Cubox is fortunately equipped with 1G of ram, but core CPU speed
> is much lower then it's peers at a partly 800Mhz.
> 
> http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7
> 
> The ease of installation we see on x86 dervied systems has to do
> with the consistent boot environment provided by the BIOS. There is
> no equivalent in the ARM SoC world and this is complicated by the
> genuine competition in the market as their are literally dozen of
> CPU design companies, and hundreds of board design companies. To
> contrast, there is only really 3 x86 CPU designers (Intel, AMD and
> Via) and only much smaller cabal of board designers.

Would be nice if something got a bit more consistent.  Open firmware
with devicetree would be nice.  I suspect that will start to happen now
that servers are starting to be built.

> The closest that comes a BIOS is uboot, but that also does the job
> of a boot loader (so it's part BIOS part Grub). But there are plenty
> of board designers that don't use uboot, or fork versions of uboot
> with limited and inconsistent feature sets that they don't merge
> back. Then there are devices like the Raspberry that does something
> completely different.
> 
> So, the community is still coming to grips with all of this. The 3.7
> kernel work is the first major foundation effort to bring make the
> kernel agile in the face of all of this and allow the maintainers
> and board designers to build on a leverage more common code.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists