On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Stephen Borrill wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > Even with existing processors, only the ARM7500FE has been
> > shipped with an FPA in significant numbers, and on netbsd we still don't
> > make a use of it.
> >
> > So, to the question.  If I knock up a hack to the compiler and assembler
> > so that for NetBSD/ARM/ELF they change to a pure little-endian floating
> > point format, would there be any objections?
>
> I guess that depends on whether there is ever likely to be support for the
> FPA in the ARM7500FE. If the answer is no, then do it. However, I would
> expect a speed up for X11 with an FPA and I'm quite interested in using
> things like NCs as X terminals. They are not overendowed with processing
> power and so any gain would be useful.

	How much pain would it be to swap the data before and after
	calling inte FPA?

	Alternatively, you could provide a compile time option to use
	the old float format, so you could target a distribution for
	FPA machines.

		David/absolute		-- www.netbsd.org: No hype required --