Re: cortex / arm-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi (was Re: armelfp: new architecture name for an armel variant)

[Loïc Minier <loic.minier@linaro.org>]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
> softfp:

 I wonder what you built with softfp exactly?  Did you rebuild
 libc6, libpng12-0 for instance?  Not that I expect that most of the
 time is spent in libpng12-0, but still.

 As I understand it, we have these options:
 - keep Debian armel as is, add a new armhf hard-float port
 - keep Debian armel as is, and provide an archive of Debian armel+vfp
   rebuilt with softfp
 - keep Debian armel as is, and change a dozen of libs to provide a VFP
   version (softfp)

 One way to check how well softfp performs would be to run povray in
 Ubuntu versus in Debian; this will mix noise in the results, but I
 don't expect the minor sourceful differences to make the biggest
 impact, but rather the toolchain opts would.  (You're speaking of a
 3-folds increase.)

        archive         dist            toolchain defaults
        -------         ----            ------------------
        Debian armel    sid, squeeze    armv4t + soft
        freevec.org     karmic          armv6 + hardfp
        Ubuntu armel    karmic          armv6 + softfp
        Ubuntu armel    jaunty          armv5t + soft
        Ubuntu armel    lucid           armv7t2 + softfp

 Would be nice to know against which userspace you ran your povray
 "softfp".

 I think povray is a nice example of a random package where we wouldn't
 put the effort to create a vfp pass, and where there's no lib, so it
 might indeed be a good example of a hardfp candidate.

-- 
Loïc Minier