Re: Problems compiling . soft-float

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

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 10:55:17AM +0000, Dominic Sweetman wrote:

> Incremental changes to the ABI are pretty bad news.  Isn't it
> avoidable in this case?
> 
> It seems to me that soft-float programs are either carefully
> controlled test cases, or used as part of a 100% soft-float system.
> 
> In the first case the programmer had better take care, and in the
> second the kernel should have been changed to kill any program with an
> FP op-code.

Experience shows that people will use every opportunity to shot themselfes
into their foot ...

Even a soft-fp system may still have the in-kernel emulator, so be able to
execute both soft-fp and hard-fp binaries correctly.  But it won't be able
to support a mix of both nor would the kernel know that an application is
just mixing hard and soft fp.

  Ralf