[colug-432] Fwd: Re: Debian on Pi

[FiL Farris]

Does hard / soft float refer to, or lack of, a math coprocessor (fpu)?

Your reference to a 486 SX in regards to no math-co brought back a happy
memory of populating a small socket with a Intel 387.
On May 6, 2013 12:17 AM, "Rick Troth" <rmt at casita.net> wrote:

> I'd like to hear more about this.
>
> Sounds like supporting "hard float" was/is way more complicated with ARM
> than the hard/soft float support back in the pre-Pentium days.  I still
> have a 486 "SX" which requires math emulation.  But on INTeL x86 series HW,
> that's a boolean flag when building the kernel.  No need to re-compile the
> apps.  (Unless I have missed something profound.)
>
>
> -- R; <><
>
>
>
>
> On May 5, 2013 12:11 PM, <lhowell at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> >The primary difference between the Raspbian and Debian images is that
>> Raspbian is hard-float and Debian is soft-float.  Debian will work fine,
>> but at the cost of a performance hit.  The Pi ARM11 hardware does well for
>> what it is, but needs all the help from the OS it can get so I'd choose HF.
>>  I followed the creation of Raspbian vian discussions on the debian-arm
>> mailing list, which was a six month effort as the Debian "wheezy" source
>> for 35000+ packages was rebuilt for the ARM11 v6 ABI instead of the normal
>> ARM9 v7 ABI.  Much of the time was spent fixing hard-float issues.  The
>> Cambridge team was very time constrained and chose the more expedient path
>> of building with soft-float.
>> >My wife gave me two Pi's for Christmas.  One is my media server running
>> the Pi version of openELEC (openelec.tv) and I used to other one to pass
>> the Kalamazoo winter evenings experimenting with different OS images.  If
>> you want a minimal headless OS I suggest looking at
>> http://www.pi-point.co.uk/raspbian-minimal/ which is the standard
>> Raspbian HF image with about 75% of the packages stripped.  You can start
>> small and add whatever you like from the Raspbian repo.
>> >SD cards are a sticky issue, and a discussion for another time.  The Pi
>> demands quality cards.  I've had good luck with SanDisk Mobile microSDHC
>> 4GB cards (4.99 at MC).  I don't worry too much about the class rating.
>>  That rating criteria is for handling relatively large files on cameras,
>> not the much smaller files on an embedded device like the Pi.
>> >
>> >Larry
>> >
>> >
>>
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>
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