Re: [RESEND][PATCH 1/3] meta: add new qemuarma9 machine definition

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 18:17 -0700, Andre McCurdy wrote:
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Martin Jansa <martin.jansa@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 03:25:43PM +0100, Burton, Ross wrote:
> >> On 11 May 2015 at 20:52, Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov <dmitry_eremin@mentor.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Currently qemuarm is limited to 256 Mb of RAM. Sometimes this is too
> >> > little to run necessary applications. Add a new arm configuration based
> >> > on Versatile Express board, Cortex-A9 CPU, allowing up to 1Gb of RAM.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Not sure I'm keen on oe-core having two almost-identical qemuarm machines.
> >> Why not just change the qemuarm machine to use the A9?
> >
> > Then we should officially drop thumb1 support, because current qemuarm
> > builds are quite broken when thumb is enabled and dropping current
> > qemuarm or replacing it with A9 variant will prevent oe-core to be
> > testable on autobuilder. See
> > https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7717
> 
> +1 for updating qemuarm to an ARMv7 CPU.

One thing I did notice about the new proposed arm machine was the lack
of graphics support. We really do need a machine with graphics. If we
could get a machine which had graphics and more memory that would be
much more attractive to switch to.

This also has implications on the kernel support (cc Bruce).

> As for dropping thumb1 support that's probably fine too - although
> technically (if someone really did want to keep thumb1 support alive)
> I guess nothing prevents testing thumb1 binaries on an ARMv7 CPU?

Just guessing but they might work in some cases an a v7 CPU but fail on
older ones due to alignment constraints?

Cheers,

Richard