On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 12:26:33AM -0800, Kedar Sovani wrote:
- I understand a little bit about the different calling
conventions, FP differences (e.g. soft FPU versus VFP), and instruction set differences (v5 versus v7). a) Can the kernel can be safely built with a different instruction set targeted? (I know there are different optimisation options passed to GCC. Apologies if this seems a bit newbie-ish.)
Yes, this is no problem -- you can run v4 applications on a v7 kernel just fine.
b) For FP-heavy programs (e.g. ogg encoding), is it possible to build the packages with VFP/NEON but still get them to work in a soft FPU system? I'd imagine any call to an external library would have to somehow be defined to use a different calling standard.
I am not entirely sure on this... Anyone?
The calling standard is actually compatible, so e.g. it's no problem to run an softfloat-compiled application with a library built for VFP and vice versa.