All,
I need to supply a Linaro toolchain "aligned" (same source code) bare-metal compiler to a group doing benchmarking on A15.
First off my assumption is that we will write our own boot and semi hosting code. (semi-hosting for TI emulators/simulators is different than ARM RDI semi-hosting.)
I was planning on looking at the two toolchains here[1] and here [2]: [1] https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries [2] https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded
I was then going to build a hybrid that was newlib based but appropriate for armv7-a (instead of cortext-m3) and maybe even -mtune'ed for A15.
However looking at the gcc-arm-embedded release more[3] I see that it supports ARMv7-R. It supports both thumb and non-thumb modes, both softfp and hardfp ABIs.
What would I really gain by building my own? For app code the user should be able to add -mtune=cortex-a15 and still be compatible with the pre-built R4/R5 libraries. The only performance difference should be in the library code and that should be only pipeline tuning if I understand the difference between armv7-a and armv7-r correctly.
Am I missing something? Should I build my hybrid anyway?
[1] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/88152755/readme.txt
[BTW: has the below project been obsoleted by the gcc-arm-embedded one? Perhaps gcc-arm-embedded should be referenced in the description of the page below. https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-unsupported ]
Thanks, Bill