ECOS Q: FP context support.

ECOS Q: FP context support.

[Sergei Organov]

Hello;

Is any active work started to support floating point context in eCos?
Is there any preliminary info about it (FP context switch policies,
required changes to HAL and API interfaces, etc.)? Is it planned to
have FP support in the next release of PPC target? I found the only
reference to the FP support in the eCos distribution (in the TODO
list).

Thanks in advance,
Sergei Organov.

[ECOS] Re: Q: FP context support.

[Bart Veer]

>>>>> "Sergei" == Sergei Organov <osv@javad.ru> writes:

    Sergei> Hello; Is any active work started to support floating
    Sergei> point context in eCos? Is there any preliminary info about
    Sergei> it (FP context switch policies, required changes to HAL
    Sergei> and API interfaces, etc.)? Is it planned to have FP
    Sergei> support in the next release of PPC target? I found the
    Sergei> only reference to the FP support in the eCos distribution
    Sergei> (in the TODO list).

There is no active work at present on floating point context support,
or the other aspects of hardware floating point support such as
additional exception handlers. At this stage none of the supported
architectures have hardware floating point support so the issue has
not arisen. Instead we provide floating point through software
emulation in the libm package.

When somebody starts working with a processor which does have hardware
floating point it will be necessary to define the appropriate HAL
extensions, including details of desirable configuration options. This
has not yet happened. However there are plans for Cygnus to support PPC
variants with floating point hardware, so it is certainly going to
happen. 

Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer