Differences between arm "versions?" (ARMv7 only)

Question

Basically I would like to know the difference between ARMv7l and ARMv7hl?

I got a arm processor with armv7l and there are a lot of rpm's for armv7hl.

I don't exactly know what I have to search for to get information about that.

What is this "suffix" called? Are there any other types? What are they doing differently?

Solution

I would assume that it's indicating packages compiled for little-endian and hard-float ABI as appropriate - i.e. it's a software thing and only tangentially related to the hardware.

In other words, you don't actually have an "armv7l" processor - you have an ARMv7 processor which may well have a hardware FPU (and can run big-endian if you really wanted to), but you happen to be running a soft-float userspace that doesn't rely on one being present - just like running an i686 distribution doesn't imply you're not on an x86_64 machine. Different Linux distributions have different names for their various ports but some trivial poking around suggests this case might be openSUSE's convention.