[erlang-questions] HiPE on ARM Build Issue

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 14/04/2012, at 8:12 PM, Kostis Sagonas wrote:

> In the HiPE team we would very much like to support the ARM architecture
> but the problem these days - for quite some time actually - is that we do not have access to any machine with an ARM processor. It's very painful to be testing ARM using QEMU, esp. all sorts of different ARMs that exist these days. Hence, occasionally code tends to rot or, as in this case which involves a newer ARMv7, code has never been tested on newer architectures.

When my colleague Andrew Trotman wanted to port his information retrieval engine
to ARM (which turned out to mean 'configure, make, make install' (:-)) he bought
a cheap mobile phone and installed Linux on it.  You can get one for under NZD150.

A BeagleBone board is USD 89.  armv7.

> 
> (I do not know what sort of access to ARM machines the Erlang/OTP team at Ericsson has, but I suspect that they do not have access to all possible ARMs either.)

Since ARM is found in all sorts of SoC designs, "all possible ARMs" may well be an
infinite set; even "all actual ARMs" is rather large.  I don't suppose HiPE would
be interested in Jazelle or NEON.