11/14/2022 0 Comments Ralink rt2870 usb pupy linux![]() ![]() But it will only cover ARMv7 (which have VFP), and above (think BeagleBone). To make matters worse, Debian is cooking up a new official port for the ARM, called "ArmHardFloatPoint", which they hope to officially include in Debian 7. All floating point operations (think "Multimedia") will instead be done using software-based emulation, incurring a substantial loss in performance. In other words, once all the new Rasberry Pi users install Debian for the first time, as it currently stands, they might be disappointed to discover that their floating point hardware functionality just sits there, affectively unusable. The current situation seems to go something like this: Even though the Raspberry Pi''s ARMv6 processor has "hardware floating point" (the CPU feature is called "VFP"), Debian''s current, official "ARM EABI" port (for Debian 6) unfortunately does not compile support for VFP in! Maybe we should all petition them to include it? We''d have to act fast, before Debian's upcoming freeze occurs "sometime in the middle of 2012". ![]() So what hope is there of Debian officially compiling hardfloat support for the RasPi? I''m still awaiting to see a fair comparison of hardfloat-vs-no-hardfloat on the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6. So that''s not an apples-to-apples comparison. ![]() Note: The Cortex-A8 mentioned above is ARMv7, whereas the Raspberry Pi is only ARMv6. ![]() They noticed important wins (in the order of 40% performance improvement) in floating-point heavy applications/libraries such as mesa, with a Cortex-A8 CPU." did a proof-of-concept rebuild of Ubuntu karmic (9.10)'s armel port with the hard-floating. From a bit of reading at Debian''s website, it looks like it could be quite a bad performance loss (at least whenever one is doing anything that heavily relies on floating point operations): (Note: having said that, I haven't got the means to do this myself.)Ĭan anyone speak to just how much real-world performance is actually lost due to Debian not being natively compiled for ARMv6 (like the Fedora remix is?)Īargh. I think this would generate some serious geek "street cred". I mean come on, doesn't anyone want to be the first to brag about having the "Cheapest Debian Cluster Ever"? Think of it: a whole cluster for the price of one half-decent PC! Never mind the millions that Mark Shuttleworth invested, this is some serious bang for the buck. I know this is some Pi-in-the-Sky dreaming, but I hope some Debian-friendly philanthropist (other than Mark Shuttleworth) out there (or Debian-friendly software consultancy looking to do some "sponsoring" for the sake of some awesome, inexpensive PR) with, say, $700ish to invest (and some SysAdmin skills) builds a cluster of, say, 10 Raspberry Pi's, then politely invites key Debian ARM porting developers (like, say Riku Voipio, Martin Michlmayr, and/or Aurelien Jarno from Debian) to remotely log into said cluster to possibly do the building of all the Debian package repositories for ARMv6. I started with Redhat 4.1 way back in the day, but once I moved from Redhat to Debian a few years later, and beheld the power of APT, there was no going back (to an RPM-based distro).Ĭonsidering the scale or the Raspberry Pi launch is there any chance Debian might be recompiled with hardfloat or Canonical might be convinced to build an ARMv6 target? If I had my Druthers, Ubuntu would be the premier distro of the RPi, but failing that, I would want Debian as the "runner up", not Fedora. deb based systems for too long to be bothered changing to Fedora I think. ![]()
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