Discontinued support of EABI (Soft Float)

[markcalhoun]

Hi all,

I'd just like to get a discussion going about NXP discontinuing the support of soft float starting in the 4.1 kernel releases. I believe this is the Jethro release.

Has anyone else noticed this? Have you had issues with your binaries or libraries running against the Jethro release? 

I would also like to hear from an NXP member about the reasoning for disabling EABI (soft float support) and only allowing EABI-hf.

[markcalhoun]

Hi Carlos,

Simple typo, sorry! I've edited the post.

Discontinued support of EABI. As of 4.1 kernel there is ONLY support for Hard Float. No Soft Float. This can be seen when you attempt to turn off Hard Float. It's also stated in the README.

[Carlos_Musich]

Hi Mark,

sorry for delay. Which Kernel versions are you talking about? Which kernel versions have Soft Float enabled by default?

I am not sure how old may be these kernel versions which are built with soft fp. But the reason why hard fp is used now is because of performance.

I understand that applications, which are built under “hardfp” option, cannot work under Linux, that was compiled under “softfp” and vceversa – because different ABI conventions; function parameters transfer are different : the soft float conventions assume passing floats through general purpose (integer) registers, but “hardfp” uses the floating point register. Please note that it is possible to rebuild "all the apps and everything around Linux (kernel, libs, etc...) to use soft float".

Regards,
Carlos

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[Carlos_Musich]

Hi mark,

I am confused... At the beginning of you post and in the title you say "discontinuing the support of hard float" but at the end you say "disabling EABI (soft float support) and only allowing EABI-hf".

Hardware support is enabled by default.Can you provide details or specific information about your concern?

Regards,

Carlos