Hi, Since changesets 16606 and 16607 we have switched to using software floating point emulation in the toolchain and we disabled the in-kernel FPU Emulator in the MIPS kernel by default.
The rationale behind this is : - the FPU emulator of the kernel is slow and works by catching floating point operations exceptions, emulating them and continuing its work - software floating point emulation is only added when a program needs it and will not bloat fixed point programs (most) with software floating point code, additionnaly software floating point is faster due to the absence of the exception mechanism - for consistency, other targets (arm, powerpc) also use software floating point This allows us to have a kernel which is slightly smaller (~ 1%) and faster, and since most programs do not use floats, their memory footprint do not change while programs using float have a slightly bigger one as they require software floating point emulation. Still the tradeoff is worth :) The "bad" effect is that you have to recompile your mips/mipsel toolchain AND kernel otherwise you will get a device which boots the kernel then silently fails while running busybox (the later using floats). Thank you very much for your attention. -- Best regards, Florian Fainelli Email : [email protected] http://openwrt.org -------------------------------
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