Re: FP emulation patch available

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 07:08:23AM -0500, Jay Carlson wrote:

> Whether Linux or NetBSD, as systems, were ever serious MIPS run-time
> systems---well, you wrote the book, so I'm inclined to get out of the
> argument.
> 
> >From my LinuxCE perspective, a full FP emu is fairly important for getting
> binary compatibility back with mainline Linux/MIPS---we've been in the
> softfp ghetto.  But most of what we do with FP is, uh, keep /bin/df happy
> when it tries to calculate the percentage of free disk space, and the like.
> And dropping softfp means we don't *have* to maintain a forked
> toolchain/libc.

Have you considered contribution of the softfp code to GNU libc or
packaging it as a glibc addon?  For small embedded systems it seems to
be the better tradeoff than the kernel emulator and for these systems
nobody cares very much about binary compatibility with something else.

  Ralf