Floating point emulation support policy

[Anup Patel]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: opensbi <opensbi-bounces at lists.infradead.org> On Behalf Of Xim
> Sent: 30 March 2021 08:14
> To: opensbi at lists.infradead.org
> Subject: Floating point emulation support policy
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> My institution wants to run GNU/Linux distributions on a RISC-V core without
> hardware floating point support. We used Berkeley Boot Loader (BBL) before
> which has a built-in support for soft floating point emulation. We are
> swtching to OpenSBI but no such emulations seem to exist in OpenSBI for
> now. I wonder if OpenSBI would be happy to accept a port of such functions.

The suggestion of adding floating point emulation in OpenSBI has been
proposed to us quite a few times in past.

Instead of adding floating point emulation in OpenSBI, another option is
to disable FP for Linux RISC-V kernel and compiler user-space using soft-float
toolchain. This approach will perform much better as compared to OpenSBI
trapping and emulating floating point instructions.

Regards,
Anup