Hello.

I was looking in the maillist archive but I didn't find an answer.

Did somebody planned to compile, test and release FPC for the Pandora handgeld game console? (www.openpandora.org)

I will try to buy one when it comes to be available (pre-order on September 30) so if nobody else will I would try, but I have not experience with cross-compiling and I never compiled a compiler :S

Guillermo Martínez Jiménez wrote

I was looking in the maillist archive but I didn't find an answer. Did somebody planned to compile, test and release FPC for the Pandora handgeld game console? (www.openpandora.org)

I've not heard of anyone wanting to this. Looking at the specs it will probably require ARMEL with eabi support though, which afaik is at best very shaky currently.

Jonas

2008/9/16 Jonas Maebe :

I see. So, I'm "wanting to this".

I don't know what's ARMEL or "eabi" support. Where can I find documentation to compile FPC on a new ARM platform?

Guillermo "Ñuño" Martínez

Typo, I meant "wanting to do this".

I don't know what's ARMEL or "eabi" support. Where can I find documentation to compile FPC on a new ARM platform?

Nowhere, but there is documentation on how to (cross-)compile FPC: http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/buildfaq.pdf

See also the messages titled "How hard is it to port FPC to AIX" on http://lists.freepascal.org/lists/fpc-devel/2008-September/thread.html (classified under the wrong thread, because they were posted starting with a rely to another thread).

I don't know of any documentation on how to build FPC for ARMEL with eabi, and as I said support for it is very shaky (it doesn't work properly for Linux yet either, afaik) so it will probably still require code generator work as well.

Jonas

there's a thread with subject "FPC_ARMEL system calls" from circa june this year that's got some info about building, etc. you should be able to compile for arm, but add OPT=-dFPC_ARMEL to make it eabi. there should really be a new target for this, i guess.

i'm not that hot on fpc internals, but someone has done some work for eabi. syscalls have some changes in alignment of parameters and there is some procedure call differences iirc but it looks like it should do the right thing. you might have a problem with fpu, though. i haven't got an eabi setup, yet, so i can't test properly.

henry

Hi

I had some amount of success with armel, EABI on arm-linux with lotsa help from Henry Vermaak. As said before, still shaky support. I had to shuffle between sysutils.o and system.o from different svn trunks to get things working a bit decent on gtk1. But still lots of run time errors which are not persistent. ie , the binary may work sometimes without problems at other time simply fail giving RT errors.

Due to these I have switched to Ruby and FoxLib (fxRuby), which work like a song.

regards

Nataraj

Thanks for your messages.

By the way, I've read at Free Pascal's download site that there's two ARM versions for the compiler, one of them is for Linux. Pandora will use a Linux distro (www.freepascal.org/down/arm/linux.var). Does somebody use that one?

Guillermo "Ñuño" Martínez

En/na Guillermo Martínez Jiménez ha escrit:

The problem is that pandora is an armel distribution (i.e. arm eabi), like, e.g., maemo for the n8x0, while the fpc compiler on that page is for arm (old arm abi).
If the kernel has been compiled with oabi compatibility, a binary generated with fpc could run, but then you have to also have available the corresponding libraries and there are problems with some ioctl (since struct have a different alignment in eabi and oabi). fpc eabi support is not mature (or it wasn't last time I tried to cross-compile a program for my tablet).

See also http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort

Bye

make all/cycle with OPT=-dFPC_ARMEL

and as I said support for it is very shaky (it doesn't work properly for Linux yet either, afaik) so it will probably still require code generator work as well.

I've only one arm box so I can't work well on oabi and eabi. My box still runs oabi (multi boot is not possible with the Thecus). If someone offers me reliable access to a fast >=500 MHz, >=128 MB eabi box, some GB HD, I'll fix the needed stuff.

Unfortunately I haven't funds enough to made a donation.

Anyway I'll buy a Pandora soon (pre-order starts today) and I'll try i t by myself even that I haven't experience with ARM (I have a few with Z-80, 8046 and 8088/8086).