Hi, Douglas Crosher (dougc on irc) asked few days ago about hardfp ABI [1] support on B2G. Well, we actually rely on AOSP mainstream toolchain (based on gcc 4.4.x) and this toolchain lacks support of ABI hardfp cause Android doesn't have hard-float ABI support. Fortunately, Linaro team has an Android toolchain that supports hardfp ABI, so this is the tool I'm going to try with. I'm pretty sure that supporting hard-float ABI would imply a large gain on performance, so I strated to investigate on how to implement it on B2G but I have some concerns. Softfp and hardfp ABIs are incompatible between them, so you cannot link libraries with different VFP ABIs. Now we are using softfp [2] for the whole system (gonk and gecko) so one of the tasks that we need to make is locate all prebuilt binaries that we cannot compile, like vendor specific drivers. Someone on irc (jld?) told me that plugin-container could depends on propietary GL libraries, that will need to be recompiled/migrated with hardfp ABI support. Another typical library could be the RIL implementation (libsecril.so, libril.so, etc). As someone pointed on #b2g, it looks like vendors would love to see their drivers/libraries runs far more faster so I hope they could provide us both softp and hardfp ABI libraries. So, Do you know of any other libraries or any other reason that could block us from going to hardfp support?
I'm now integrating Linaro Android Toolchain into the build system. It's based on gcc 4.6 so far, but the Linaro team told me that we should be able to compile with gcc 4.7, so this will be my next step. It would be nice to create a meta bug that will depend on some other bugs/tasks that I have in mind (like integrating linaro toolchain or keep both softfp and hardfp in the build system) , so if we don't get any reason to not to continue with this, I'm going to file the bug and follow the discussion there. Waitting for your feedback, Juan Gómez. _AtilA_ _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
