Notice for ARM users

[Sebastian Huber]

Hello everybody,

there were two important changes for nearly all ARM BSPs:

1. The software floating point model changed from FPA to VFP. This was
necessary because Newlib does not support the FPA model.  The usage of FPA
yields random memory accesses or wrong math results on little endian ARM
machines.  This was discussed on the mailing list (search for ARM and printf).
 The RTEMS 4.10 and 4.11 tool chains support this model.  We should remove the
FPA support in the final 4.11 tool chain if no error reports occur.

2. The interrupt handler API changed.  It matches now the definitions in
<rtems/irq.h> and <rtems/irq-extension.h>.  See also

http://www.rtems.org/onlinedocs/doxygen/cpukit/html/group__rtems__interrupt__extension.html

The API in <rtems/irq.h> is deprecated from my point of view.

This change eliminated a lot of files with copy and paste or assembler code.
Everything compiles and links, but I was not able to test all BSPs [0].  It is
likely that something is broken now.  It would be nice if active ARM users can
test their favorite BSP with the CVS head and report bugs.

The generic interrupt support has some amount of overhead due to the shared
handler support.  If this overhead is a problem we can easily add conditional
compilation to the framework code and strip it down.

Have a nice weekend!

[0] The lpc24xx and lpc32xx were tested on real hardware.  The edb7316 BSP were
tested on Skyeye simulator and passes all tests.

-- 
Sebastian Huber, embedded brains GmbH

Address : Obere Lagerstr. 30, D-82178 Puchheim, Germany
Phone   : +49 89 18 90 80 79-6
Fax     : +49 89 18 90 80 79-9
E-Mail  : sebastian.huber at embedded-brains.de
PGP     : Public key available on request.

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