Changes between Version 7 and Version 8 of TBR/UserManual/Floating_Point_Support


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Timestamp:
07/12/09 06:09:39 (15 years ago)
Author:
Kptrs
Comment:

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  • TBR/UserManual/Floating_Point_Support

    v7 v8  
    8585}}}
    8686If floating point is defined as available, and if the executing task has a floating point context, then that context will be saved and restored in context switches. But where do these definitions of floating point support come from? Read on.
    87 = BSP Support =
     87= BSP/cpukit Support =
    8888
    8989
     
    123123In addition to the preprocessor definitions for floating point settings, the BSP must provide the actual functions for various operations such as saving and restoring the floating point context, since they are CPU dependent. These are typically found in {{{cpukit/score/cpu/<cpu name>/cpu_asm.S</code>.
    124124= Compiler Support =
     125
     126
     127This is specific to GCC cross-compilers, since those are the compilers generally expected for RTEMS, and are the ones I have experience using with RTEMS.
     128
     129In general, a GCC cross-compiler has command line options for specifying what member of a CPU family for which to specialize the object code, as well as command line options to enable use of specific CPU features/accessories, such as a hardware FPU. Typically, the specific CPU has an option like {{{-mcpu=<cpu_type></code> with several supported CPU types. Also typically, there is an option such as {{{-msoft-float</code> to tell GCC to use software floating point subroutines (generally in some compiler-provided library) rather than generating hardware FPU instructions and using hardware FPU registers.
     130
     131'''This raises a problem.''' Unfortunately, GCC versions since 3.4 or so and up to at least 4.3.3 (I think) will sometimes use registers in a hardware floating point unit as temporary storage, ''even for integer variables.'' There is some indication that maybe using an optimization level less than 3 avoids this, though it is not obvious that any of the documented level 3 optimizations have anything to do with this, and that might be CPU-dependent.
     132
     133From the perspective of the RTEMS kernel, this means that even tasks that are not floating point might try to access hardware FPU registers thanks to compiler tricks. Even worse, the kernel code itself (which does not use floating point) might be "unknowingly" compiled to use floating point registers!