what is armel and how armel relate to arm?

Question

At link http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=9081 I found that interpret armel as little endian ARM is wrong. But what in this case is armel?

Answer 1

In the context of Maemo and Debian architecture names, it refers to a binary-incompatible change in the ABI (the function-calling and return-value conventions) which necessitated a complete new port of Debian.

https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort will tell you far more about the differences than you ever wanted to know. The bottom line is that *_arm.deb and *_armel.deb are two incompatible ports, and *_armel.deb is 11 times faster when doing floating point, as well as allowing you to compile your own applications using hardfloat (precisely, -mfloat-abi=softfp) and link then with the softfloat libraries in your generic distro to gain a further 3 to 7 times speed increase.

Answer 2

It's ARM running in little-endian mode.