On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 03:08:17PM +0100, Michael Brown wrote:
> On 29/03/18 01:45, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:
> > I have some questions concerning the compilation flags used by iPXE on ARM.
> >
> > There are a lot of different ARM CPUs available. Why do we set
> > -mcpu=cortex-a15?
>
> In all honesty, I don't remember. My best guess is that the build options
> were copied from whatever the EDK2 toolchain happens to use. I'd have to dig
> out my notebooks to find out for sure.
>
> > Couldn't we use something like
> > -march=armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mfloat=hard
> > instead? This is what Debian requires for armhf.
>
> Mark: would this be sensible for AArch32 UEFI?
Unfortunately, UEFI forbids FP/simd/vector usage for AArch32, so I don't
think it's safe to pass -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 or -mfloat=hard. In contrast,
UEFI permits FP and SIMD for AArch64.
Per the UEFI 2.7 spec [1], section 2.3.5.3, describing AArch32:
Floating point, SIMD, vector operations and other instruction set
extensions must not be used.
It's probably necessary to use -mgeneral-regs-only to ensure the
compiler doesn't implicitly use vectors/simd, and if FP is necessary,
softfloat must be used.
Using -march=armv7a sounds fine to me otherwise, assuming IPXE is not
expected to run on ARMv6 or earlier.
I've also just spotted that the spec also states:
The EFI ARM platform binding defines register r9 as an additional
callee-saved variable register.
... which probably requires some special GCC option.
Thanks,
Mark.
[1]
http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI%20Spec%202_7_A%20Sept%206.pdf
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