Fwd: Is VFP or Neon supported in kernel-side code? <EOM>

[Dave Martin]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Martin <dave.martin at linaro.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 5:01 PM
Subject: Re: Is VFP or Neon supported in kernel-side code? <EOM>
To: Tixy <tixy at yxit.co.uk>


> Is VFP or Neon supported in kernel-side code?

Currently, no.

There is some possible future work to see if we can enable this, to
allow acceleration of some number-crunching algorithms in the kernel,
but it's not implemented yet.

For now, I think it's reasonable simply to reject attempts to insert
kprobes on VFP/NEON instructions (as we must for cp15).  I think that
these instructions are never used at the entry/exit points of
compiler-generated functions -- in any case, we build the kernel with
-msoft-float, so actually the compiler should never implicitly
generate these instructions at all.

Cheers
---Dave


On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Tixy <tixy at yxit.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> linaro-kernel mailing list
> linaro-kernel at lists.linaro.org
> http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-kernel
>