Lesson learned on doing a toolchain build or anything else for that matter; make sure you are reading the most current documentation available. I was working with very old versions of the software by using the GNU ARM website mentioned earlier. In digging into the problems for those builds, I found a few other sites that have detailed discussions on building the toolchain for specific version of the ARM platform.

I found the GNU ARM Toolchain website awhile back and that they have several different versions out there for the toolchain. A toolchain is just the basic tools needed to build software. In this case it is the standard libraries, the compiler, debugger and various other tools needed to write software. The version of the toolchain that is provided by Seagate is version 3.0 and a very old version. The oldest on the ARM website is 3.3 with 4.1 being the newest.

Earlier I mentioned a technology called “Jazelle DBX” for the ARM processor that allows for Java Bytecode eXecution (JBX) directly in the ARM hardware which should make it run faster. That DBX technology is being phased out with newer Thumb-2 instruction set being the new preference by ARM for acceleration. However, the processor in the BlackArmor NAS was the first processor to have this Jazelle DBX feature and I want to see if it has any merit. I did some digging around, like I mentioned I would, and found that Sun had produced a version of Java that may have this technology.

So earlier I was digging around trying to find out more about the Black Armor NAS hardware and pulled some interesting information. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of ARM background so a good bit of it was confusing as I reviewed it.

Snippet from earlier hardware information gathering:

$ uname -a
Linux NAS3 2.6.22.18 #1 Thu Aug 26 12:26:10 CST 2010 v0.0.8 armv5tejl unknown
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARM926EJ-S rev 1 (v5l)

To rectify my lack of knowledge I started reading on Wikipedia and found the ARM architecture which made me realize that I’ve been missing out on an entirely different ecology of technologic innovation. The features that are available for each processor was an interesting ride down memory lane with my memory of Intel CPU features, that I’m familiar with, running parallel to the ARM decisions in the same areas. They have two completely different paths but seem to have interchange between the two. ARM has an interesting history as a company as well.