On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 05:54:31PM +0300, Petko Manolov wrote:
The current advantage of Maverick over something like iWMMXt,
considering that Debian is still hardfpa, is that Maverick is on
coprocessors 4,5,6 so it doesn't conflict with FPA, whereas if you want
to use iWMMXt at all, you have to use either softfloat or EABI for
everything because it conflicts with FPA.
Even though FPA and Maverick doesn't conflict in hardware aspect, it is
still impossible to mix both in the same dynamically linked executable.
The problems are numerous, but think about the data representation in the
memory (and within the FPUs), C argument passing, return values (as per
current GCC convention), etc.
If you want to emit Crunch assembly from C code, it indeed won't work
without a bunch of hacking. (I have successfully used inline Crunch
assembly in FPA binaries, though.)
This, however, implies that the corresponding libc has been built
with Maverick support.
Why can't we use a Crunch app on top of a, say, VFP soft-float libc?
As long as the calling conventions are the same (which they are, in
this case), I don't see why it would be a problem that the app uses
Crunch while the C library does not..