Hard float?

[shaurz]

Is Arch Linux ARM compiled for software or hardware floating-point? I'm guessing it's the former. I have recently found out about Raspbian which is a hard-float port of Debian. Any chance Arch will support hard-float?

[kmihelich]

The RPi uses the armv5 repositories, which are soft float. It does not make sense for us to rebuild everything for a single device, using an architecture/FPU combination that is found in nothing else. Hosting and maintaining another 8GB pile of packages for the (somewhat uncertain) benefit of a very tiny piece of what we support overall is just not feasible nor appropriately funded.

[heday]

I would like to create a Hard-float repo for the raspberry pi. Is there any way it can be published/hosted at archlinuxarm?

[pepedog]

It's on it's way, I have a base system running now. Soon.

[workdowg]

Good to hear!

[OrionFyre]

I just got my grubby little hands on a dozen of these. They'll be sitting around the house until I can get out to install them in a month or so. Is there anything I can do to help with compiles?

[WarheadsSE]

PlugBuild is a beast, and it just takes time really. We're going to beef the farm up this week with an extra batch of Pandas, and that should help us package-equalize v6h. For now the RPi runs the v5 rootfs just fine.

[guisacouto]

This is really good to ear! One question: when the hf repo is available, can we just change the repo and do a full system update, or do we need to do a clean install?

Best regards

[pepedog]

There is a way of coverting, but it's not straight forward. I would recommend listing installed files (pacman -Qq) and applying to new hf rootfs, and transferring config and data.
Or look at what pacman -r and arch does

[WarheadsSE]

A simple arch switch will not safely convert you.

pacman -r will not quite do it for you either. Look a github for scripts/rfs-pacman in the PKGBUILDs repo. This can probably be used to install the exact package list you have via pacman output & xargs, then copy over your configs & data to the matching location inside a mounted rootfs.