On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Nicolas Pitre <nico@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 25 Jan 2013, Josh Boyer wrote: > >> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > Hi all, >> > >> > I wanted to kick off a discussion, I think that with the work that >> > Seneca is doing for armv6hl to support the Raspberry Pi most of the >> > need for building sfp has gone away. I would like us to drop support >> > for sfp in F19 that means that anyone running a kirkwood based system >> > would get supported software updates for approximately 13 months from >> > now. with cubie boards and other devices coming around that are cheap >> > and more powerful and similar options I think there is little benefit >> > to continuing to support sfp. >> >> I'm not overly familiar with arm, but from a kernel standpoint you might >> be able to enable floating point emulation. That would let you run the >> hardfp binaries on the boards without an FPU. > > No, you can't. OK. > The only FP emulation the ARM kernel provide is for the antique FPA > instruction set that almost never got implemented in hardware, except > for a few exceptions that Linux never supported anyway. Ah. See, that would be where I point back to me knowning almost nothing about ARM ;). > All modern EABI compliant binaries are using the VFP instruction set, > and the only thing the kernel implements is the processing of > exceptions for them. To have a full VFP emulation support in the > kernel, significant development effort would be needed. I find this slightly interesting to be honest. In the embedded powerpc world, math emulation is used as a last ditch effort but it does exist. I would have thought the proliferation of ARM devices would generate some amount of interest in getting similar support in-kernel, but apparently not. Anyway, I'm not opposed to dropping a kernel variant at all. Makes some things simpler. josh _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
