[fpc-devel] How to get FPC to generate floating point instructions for ARM?

[michael]

OK. I understand the magnitude of the problem. I seem to have spent the best 
part of a week wrapping my head around all the different ARM variants and 
their different floating point capabilities. Not to mention ABIs etc etc. 
Before we even get onto all the different operating systems and such.

Turns out that there is no Linux distribution that supports the fastest "hard" 
floating point abi. Closest I have come is that Linaro are working on such a 
thing and it involves rebuilding the distribution from the ground up fo that 
ABI.

So, yes, I am guilty of jumping into Pascal/ARM/floating point, inoccent of 
the complications ahead.

Luckily, thanks to your tips, I have a compiler that works well enough on the 
ARM platform with the speed boost of VFPV3. The cross compiler would be 
convenient but can wait. I will no doubt fight with it again as and when I 
have free moments.

Thank you again for your help.


On Thursday 17 March 2011 12:30:42 Jonas Maebe wrote:
> On 17 Mar 2011, at 10:14, michael wrote:
> > Is this a situation that is likely to change soon? With the
> > explosive growth
> > of the ARM processor in mobile and embedded devices it would seem
> > time that
> > it was a tier one architecture.
>
> Tier one or not depends on someone who is willing to spend time on
> maintaining, packaging and supporting it. With ARM this is
> particularly time intensive because there are so many different ARM
> platforms (little/big endian, ARMv4/v5/v6/v7, OABI vs EABI, softfp vs
> AFP vs VFPv2/VFPv3, embedded/direct hardware vs Linux vs Android's
> Linux variant). If you support one, people immediately expect that you
> support all of them. Furthermore, unfortunately a lot of people who
> start working with FPC on ARM actually have very little experience
> with ARM and therefore often don't even know what variant they have or
> need, or what the consequences are.
>
> The main reason no new ARM releases have been packaged is because
> packaging one mainly results in a lot of questions from people who
> downloaded/installed it and then notice that the code simply crashes
> (because it turns out they have an incompatible platform compared to
> what the package was built for).
>
> I think it's really a "full time spare time" job to officially support
> ARM, even if you pick only a subset of all possible platforms.
>
>
> Jonas
>
> PS: for iOS, it is in fact sort of officially supported, although
> there the problem is that Apple's tools and SDK evolve very quickly so
> it is hard to keep up.
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