OT: What versions of arm require armel?

[coolaj86]

I've just automated a process of categorizing over 33,000 release assets across 100+ modern developer tooling projects and jq is the only one that explicitly has a build for armel.

What does that mean? Is that armv4? or armv5? or armv6? Or is it more OS-specific (gnueabihf vs gnueabi vs arm-eabi) than hardware specific?

I'm not a C developer and as I've been sifting through various documentation and forums trying to figure how to match which build to which unarm -m, I'm still stumped as to the overlap between hardware and gnu naming conventions.

What type of system would need an armel binary? It seems that even as far back as Raspberry Pi 1 uses arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf (armhf / armv7l).

[wader]

Hi, i think #2933 might have some info about this

[itchyny]

The armel binary is built by arm-linux-gnueabi, so this is for older versions than v7. Like Debian for ARM EABI https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort.

[coolaj86]

Thanks. This was helpful.

I did some other research and took notes here: webinstall/webi-installers#778

Basically what I've learned is that ARM is a very robust set of standards that it not always fully implemented for special purpose boards - most of which we would never need to care about.

• armv7 (armhf) has been around since 2008 (Gumstix, BeagleBoard)
• but armv6 (armel, arm11) was put in brand new devices as recently as 2014 (RPi B+)

Bottom Line

I can't find reference to any popular devices that would need armel.
I think you'd have to go back to a device more than 20 years old - before ARM was yet hip.

The original Raspberry Pi 1 was armv6hf (a custom module set inbetween armv7 and armv6), but some of the OSes of that era may have been compiled as armel for backwards compatibility. If so, they would have required armel binaries, or possibly the addition of libc:armhf.
I can't easily find a version that old to test with to confirm.

Statically compiled armhf binaries would run on an armel-compiled OS as long as the hardware was armv6hf or newer.