gentoo on the new beagleboard-xm

[chris_harvey]

I'm expecting a new beagleboard-xm in the mail near the end of this month.
I want to run gentoo on it. For those of you who don't know the beagleboard uses an SD card as a boot device. You can read more about the beagleboard here. http://beagleboard.org/hardware-xM and more about the processor here: http://www.itechnews.net/2010/06/09/ti-sitara-cortex-a8-1ghz-processors/ .

It's a pretty beefy machine but I want to try cross-compiling from my main machine for the beagleboard-xm, to at least get it off the ground. I found some instructions for the previous version of the beagleboard here: https://www.slashorg.net/48-Gentoo-port-for-BeagleBoard.html
Those instructions provide an already built kernel and stage files. I want to compile my own kernel, so I can learn about how to cross compile for the ARM processor and so I know exactly what I'm putting into that kernel. I've used crossdev before, for the AVR micros. Crossdev has support for two kinds of ARM cores and there are stages for several others.

armv4tl-softfloat-linux-gnueabi/ 19-Sep-2010 14:27 -
armv5tel-softfloat-linux-gnueabi/ 19-Sep-2010 14:27 -
armv6j-unknown-linux-gnueabi/ 19-Sep-2010 14:27 -
armv7a-unknown-linux-gnueabi/ 19-Sep-2010 14:27 -

crossdev has arm and armeb and softfloat options. I know softfloat is a software implementation of floating point numbers, but I haven't been able to figure out arm and armeb. I also don't know if that processor I linked to has floating point hardware (I hope it does).

If anybody has any tips on what stage/kernel/arch to use for the beagleboard-xm please let me know..

thanks,
Chris

[John R. Graham]

Moved from Kernel & Hardware to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

[Etal]

There was a project for Gentoo on OMAP3-based devices, unfortunately their site seems to have been down for a while. You can look through the google cache results, or ask on their mailing list.

[wim-x]

All Beagleboards use an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU for which the armv7a is the right architecture. According to Wikipedia, the CPU has an optional VFPv3 Floating Point Unit.

I would think the hardfloat version of the armv7a is your best bet (since the xm has the best cpu of all Beagleboards).