Re: [PATCH 1/1] beagleboard: enable hard floating point abi

[Philip Balister <philip@balister.org>]

On 08/23/2011 05:38 AM, Koen Kooi wrote:
>
> Op 20 aug. 2011, om 00:23 heeft Darren Hart het volgende geschreven:
>
>> Fixes [YOCTO #1203]
>>
>> Using the hard floating point abi is incompatible with some binary libaries and
>> 3D support for the Beagleboard. As we do not provide these in poky and
>> meta-yocto, we can take advantage of the hard floating point abi.
>
> What advantage are you talking about? So far everyone has been unable to provide real-world numbers[1] that show hardfp making a difference compared to a properly configured softfp. The numbers debian and meego are showing are comparing it against completely vfpless builds, which borders on fraud.
>
> Yocto is of course free to do what it pleases, but switching to hardfp isn't going to make beagle support better, only worse. But if that's your goal, go for it, meta-ti is still there to provide the absolute best beagle support.
>
> [1] povray is the only outlier, but I don't think people will build beagle based renderfarms in the near future.

The big win for hard float ABI (emphasis mine) is functions that return 
floating point values. I personally care about this, but we also know 
returning floats is "bad" so we sort of avoid it.

I agree with Phil Blundell that this is not a beagle specific thing.

Long term I expect hard float to become normal, but I see no need to 
rush there (no matter what other distros are claiming).

Philip