Re: OABI [was Re: COMPAT_NETBSD32 in GENERIC.common]

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 13:42, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 08:29:38AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > it seems oabi is only sensible for a small number of older ARM
> > processors with a kind of floating point unit that is not found on
> > anything recent.  Is that right?
>
> We have used oabi many of our arm ports upto NetBSD 8, and for all of
> them upto NetBSD 6.
>
> Removing oabi support from kernels means no binary compatibility for
> those machines when running our own older binaries. This is bad for
> testing new kernels with old userland.
>
> No oabi compat support in userland means you can not just drop in an old
> NetBSD/oabi binary into a -current machine and run it, instead you have
> to create a chroot or similar. This is (IMHO) not that bad.

Would it make sense to drop the userland oabi support but keep the
kernel side (for at least 9), and set it to use /emul/oabi to make it
easy for people to get to if they want it but not cluttering up
userland for everyone else.

For acorn32 I believe eabi can target armv3, so they should be (some
form of) eabi capable.

David