Hello, I have the Ubuntu Linaro Soft Float installed on my Udoo. But since i entered the world of udoo i also entered the world of soft float and hard floats os:es. I get the basic concept but i would like to have a discusssion about this. Why for example does Soft float os:es exists when hard float is possible? Have anyone benchmarked the loss of emulating the FPU on a Udoo? What are the practical differences. Best Regards Rickard
In a nutshell, the drivers for things like the 3D chips weren't initially released as hard float versions, and you usually can't mix the two together (soft float driver on a hard float kernel, etc.) Over time Vivante released a hard float driver for their chips which allowed the community to move to hard float. Also, many of the older ARM chips didn't support a hardware FP command set, and in a desire to be as open to use with as many different architectures as possible, the various companies tended to support just the soft float option. Whenever possible, it's a good idea to make use of hard float, as you'll usually see significant performance increases.
Hello, Thanks for the good reply, We think we will stay with the Linaro distribution. This is mainly becouse of compatibility issues. Our setup now works, after several our of configuration. Unless we would need the extra speed, we going todo alot of image processing, we will stick to this release, gonna measure the load with a couple of tests on monday. The main reason for why we initially installed Ubuntu instead of Debian was becouse there was no sharp release at the current time of the Debian dist. But now it is. Best Regards Rickard
Well, the nice thing is that since it boots off the microSD, you can always just get another card, load it up with a different image and swap, without losing what you have on your "good" image...
This is true, or i could even just make a copy of the image and re:write it to the sd card if it dosent work, its mainly becouse of time, we have other tasks to prioritise in this project.
Hello, We did some testing yesterday and atleast at this point it seems that the Udoo with a soft float installation is doing the work very nicely. We even decided to increase the fps in our project just to make sure we are making use of the power in the udoo.
Yeah, the benefits of the hard float vs. soft float really depend a lot upon the sort of workload you're using... Some types of programs do a lot of floating point work, others don't.
