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On 14/06/12 21:33, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jun 2012, Rob Beard wrote:I found a Netinstall image for the Raspberry Pi, I think it was an unofficial version of Debian which they call Raspbian. I've only just installed it on my Pi and not really had much chance to play with it (the install was fairly slow so I left it going) but maybe it might be a good option rather than to use the current images. I'm sure you'd maybe be able to advise Gordon, I'm not an expert on Debian so I don't know if what they've done is good or bad.I run Raspbian and standard Debian in mine. However...And here you learn more about the ARM architecture and its instruction level support than you really want to know )-:The ARM in the Pi is ARM architecture version 6 ARMv6 has hardware floating point.However Debian don't consider it to be a "proper" hardware floating point processor because it's lacking some newer instructions, so it produced an release for it which has software floating point (armel). Debian requires ARMv7 before it properly supports hardware floating point.Now... It's possible to compile programs for the ARMv6 to use the hardware floating point, BUT, the function calling ABI still uses integer registers to pass floating point arguments - in Debian armel. This is somewhat sub-optimal. Also all the userland programs that might need floating point are compiled to use software floating point.
Are the GCC people looking at this? Strikes me as their domain Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq