Raspberry Pi support (armv5/6, OpenGL, xbmc, overall)

[Evert]

Hi all, I'm having a few questions about the Arch Linux ARM support for the Raspberry Pi. I have read a lot of forum topics, but I can't get a good view of how well the RPi is supported.

[*] First of all, the Raspberry Pi has an armv6 cpu, but I've read somewhere that alarm only comes in armv5 for the raspberry Pi. Has this changed, and if not, does this affect performance?

[*] The Raspberry Pi uses a special Broadcom Videocore GPU that has its own proprietary instruction set and architecture that is closely guarded by Broadcom; the compiler for it is not available. But you can use OpenGL ES to access it, how is well is that supported?

[*] XBMC. I'm planning to use my RPi as a multimedia center, so xbmc is a must. I can see at the package page that xbmc is only supported for armv7, so I'll probably have to compile it myself. How well does this works?

[*] I would also like to know the general performance of alarm on the RPi compared to Debian.

Thank you very much!

[Huulivoide]

1. Yes we only have armv5 with soft floats in Arch.
This does decrease the performance a bit. There is
some work being done on getting a armv6 support
too.

2. All of the Broadcom libs are supplied by
raspberry-firmware package. Support is as
good as it is in any other RPi distro.

3. There is a XBMC thread here in the RPI sub
section of the forums. Even redybuilt package.

4. The Rasbian debian image is ofcourse faster
becouse it uses hw floats and is RPi optimized.
The offical Debian image should be pretty much
the same, as it is armv5 soft float distro too.

[WarheadsSE]

There is actually a lot of work being done on the hard float armv6, and hopefully it will be out soon. Debian (not Raspbian) is actually arm4 I thought.

[ruidc]

According to http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianFAQ#Will_Raspbian_work_with_non-Raspberry_Pi_systems.3F Raspbian's packages are compiled for ARMv6+VFP so presume it is too.

[Kurlon]

Debian Wheezy / Raspbian - ARMv6 Hardfloat
ArchARM - ARMv5 Softfloat
Debian Squeeze - ARMv4 Softfloat

If you're not doing anything that makes use of floating point, the Arch ARMv5 soft float build will get you 99% of the perf an ARMv6 build would. The big jump in general Debian perf came from migrating from ARMv4 to ARMv6.