Hi Ben.

On Jun 7, 2013, at 5:34 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <b...@kernel.crashing.org> 
wrote:

> The question is whether this is still relevant ?

The only answer I could provide is that it's dependent upon the libraries and 
how the distributions are built.  It's also dependent upon processors with 
hardware FP that don't implement all instructions in hardware (who had that 
bright idea? :))  If distributions are fully all soft-fp in user space or all 
hardware FP, it removes the one reason that started the whole partial emulation 
option.

> …  And if the answer is
> yes,

There are multiple options, but I believe they are solved today.  One is the 
libraries coded with hardware load/store that are used by soft-fp, another is 
hardware FP that doesn't implement all instructions in hardware (which it seems 
is the basis of this thread, although I thought was already solved).  The 
variation here is that in the first case you have to read/write user space 
soft-fp stack "registers," while in the latter you read/write real FP 
registers.  There used to be the third variation where the stack was allocated 
and the emulation had to write both places due to compiler function APIs or 
optimizations.  Of course, then there is the full-up kernel emulation where 
hardware is entirely lacking.

> … we still want that "minimum" emulation of load/stores/fmr as an
> option, is there any reason why we can't replace the one in softemu8xx
> with the existing (and unused) equivalent in do_mathemu ?

It appears to me that 8xx custom code can be removed.  I guess I should try to 
boot it up, if anyone even cares these days. :)

Thanks.

        -- Dan

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