Toolchain for BBB (Debian/Wheezy)

[Anonymous]

Hi,

is there a toolchain for beablebone Black which works on Debian Wheezy?

Thanks

[ket]

Hi,

You could try to use the Raspberry Pi toolchain as it is also Debian/Wheezy based, but definitely resynchronize the sysroot before building with the toolchain. You can resynchronize the sysroot in VisualGDB Project Properties on the Makefile settings page.

[Anonymous]

Ok, I’ve tried it and it works. Thanks!
Now, I was wondering if the compiler optimizations are the same for armv6(raspberry) and armv7(BBB). Are they?

More thanks for the support.

[ket]

Hi,

The biggest difference between armv6 and armv7 is hardware floating point support. armv6 has it but armv7 does not and it can have NEON registers instead.
GCC itself is usually the same, so to optimize for armv7 try adding the following to CFLAGS to specifically target armv7:

-march=armv7

You can find the documentation on ARM GCC flags here.

[Anonymous]

I understand, now it’s clear.
Thanks a lot for the support, I really appreciate your work.

[panino]

@ket wrote:

Hi,

The biggest difference between armv6 and armv7 is hardware floating point support. armv6 has it but armv7 does not and it can have NEON registers instead.
GCC itself is usually the same, so to optimize for armv7 try adding the following to CFLAGS to specifically target armv7:

-march=armv7

You can find the documentation on ARM GCC flags here.

Another thing… I’ve just checked here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A8

and I found that armv7 also have VFPv3 (Floating Point Unit). Is that correct?

[ket]

Hi,

Both armv6 and armv7 support floating point numbers, but do it somewhat differently. armv6 uses VFPv2 and Thumb, armv7 VFPv3 and Thumb2. armv6 has hardware support for double precision floating point arithmetic, armv7 has legacy support for double precision arithmetic but fast single precision arithmetic due to the NEON unit.

[Author]

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