Re: MKSOFTFLOAT for evbppc

Greg Troxel <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.powerpc
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Matt Thomas <[email protected]> writes:

> On Sep 20, 2012, at 8:31 PM, Simon Burge wrote:
>
>> Matt Thomas wrote:
>> 
>>>> (Also, for the port page: does fp emulation via traps work?  Or is
>>>> MKSOFTFLOAT the only way that can possibly work?)
>>> 
>>> Within the past 4 months or so, I added emulation of the FPU so you can
>>> run without MKSOFTFLOAT=yes.
>> 
>> It looks like we've still got the same FPU emulator from the Walnut
>> (405GP) days.  Way back when (2001?), softfloat was orders of magnitude
>> faster on a Walnut.  There's the timings for an awk command issued
>> during a kernel build at the time:
>> 
>> 	emulate:       113.554u 2778.750s 52:30.75 91.7%
>> 	softfloat:       7.607u    1.447s  0:10.57 85.5%
>> 
>> This was the only reason we did softfloat at the time.
>
> On a P2020, a build.sh distribution for evbppc took 6.2% less time on
> a softfloat userland .vs. hardfloat userland with kernel-emulation.
>
> 10h55m32s (soft) vs. 11h38m50s (hard)

So it's good to hear that trapfloat (?) works (did you install that
build?), but 6% seems like enough that using softfloat is in order.
But, I see the point that having one userland usable on all evbppc is
nice, and perhaps not worth 6% in the standard distribution, since using
softfloat on machines with hardfloat (not trapfloat) is surely vastly
slower.
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