Hi Brian and  Kyle,

On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Chris Gilbert wrote:
> I believe that we don't currently support the Xscale chips.  Probably simply 
> because there's no systems with them (or at least I know of plans for some, 
> but none that actually use them).

thats right... i dont know any other system next to Millipede's
forthcoming Imago and the Microdigital Omega with Xscale option ... 

> However they are being considered for the plans to make arm platforms use ELF 
> at some point in the not too distant future. I'm not sure how much work is 
> required for Elf support, I believe that toolchain and kernel work is needed. 
>  There was some brief discussions that we need to change the ABI as well so 
> that we use something more sane, and that'll work with Thumb chips as well, 
> oh and have the same binaries for arm26 and arm32 would be good. :)

Dont really see the connection to ELF really... i mean, its just another
processor... not really that huge a port ... unless we want to change the
FP code to more suit the capabilities of the ARMv5 instruction set etc...

> It's also a matter of time for these things, particularly developer time.  Oh 
> and getting developers communicating.  Currently we seem to have 3 different 
> bootloaders floating around, the one that Reinoud has done (not looked at it 
> yet) the original BtRiscBSD done in C and the arm26 BBBB, which seems a 
> little bit mad, (oh and technically the other open firmware boot systems 
> possibly counts as another bootloader, but we don't have much control over 
> that)

Well i must say that, as the author of one of them, there was
communication about it ... at least with Ben Harris about the BBBB
bootloader for arm26 ... and i consulted others about the 32 bootloader
wishes... Pity it still isnt fully ok now since it still wont load
debugged kernel (i.e. kernels with the inkernel debugger swicht on - dont
know why as yet... but have no access to check it now ....) ... but at
least  we now also got the NC's booting!!!!!!

My new bootloader is more a rewrite from scratch of the origional arm32
bootloader for that one suffered a dedicated link between RISC OS version
and  caused a lot of hairy code in the kernel at boottime .... if you're
interested see the difference between teh rpc_machdep.c between the two.

Hope to  have given some clarity .... i hope :)

Cheers,
Reinoud