[ Basically as found at

http://summit.linaro.org/lcq2-12/meeting/20695/linaro-general-q112-armhf-sta...

but etherpad data has a lovely habit of going away over time... ]

Current status ==============

Just about done in the distros!

* Released in Ubuntu 12.04 * About to be accepted as a release architecture in Debian * Fedora 17 * openSUSE (12.2?) * ChromeOS switched to hard-float (recently)

We finally got agreement on the runtime linker path for arm hard-float. All the distros have incorporated the changes for that now *except* Fedora; they're planning to do it Real Soon Now.

Benchmarks ==========

The early comparisons not clear (differing hw, distro, compilers), difficult to get directly comparable numbers out.

The latest set from Konstantinos are almost complete - see

https://wiki.linaro.org/OfficeofCTO/HardFloat/Benchmarks201205

for a comparison of Ubuntu 12.04 armhf/armel on a Panda board.

Somebody needs to finish off the GUI test results. Overall, numbers as expected. Some graphics-heavy and FP-heavy code wins (povray! some media encoding), most integer code comparisons are neutral.

Remaining work ==============

Work is proceeding on ELF markers/segment definition for ABI. Time to actually implement the PT_ARM_ARCHEXT segment in binutils and (e)glibc. SteveMcIntyre working on this.

We need to clearly document what the hard-float ABI is. Plan to incorporate into or copy the existing soft-float ABI doc at Mentor nee Code Sourcery.

Java is still a mess: * http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/downloads/javase/index.html ARMv7 Linux - Headless - Server Compiler * EABI, VFP, SoftFP ABI, Little Endian* * possibly would work with ubuntu/debian multiarch

Mono is currently not hardfp and needs work to fix it up. Jani (janimo) might be a good candidate to fix mono, if we can get some of his time

libffi gained variadic support last year; wasn't used much so far ctypes would need patching to use new variadic support in libffi but ctypes isn't maintained upstream anymore; probably not worth it. Other places where libffi users may be broken.

Gnat: * Current port works but not great * Needs resources to do the real port

Ruby is still exhibiting some crashes in testsuite on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, considered likely to be a glibc locking bug.

[ACTION] UlrichWeigand and SteveMcIntyre to setup a hacking session this week to try to look into this. RESULT: problem solved - see http://bugs.debian.org/652674 for more details.

Raspberry Pi ============

Brief discussion. It's known that the Pi can support hard-float if recompiled for ARMv6 in ARM mode (e.g. unofficial Debian rebuild at http://www.raspbian.org/). General consensus from the distros: not interested in doing such ports officially, but we love the community doing so.

Cheers,