Re: synching with minios

["Robert N. M. Watson" <robert.watson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 Dec 2012, at 12:00, Balraj Singh wrote:

> Here and there, like Anil says is right.  Other than +., *., conversions and 
> of course the maths functions, the only places that I found floating point 
> (and sse) instructions when cursorily scanning the assembly was in the 
> garbage collector and much of that use was for gc stats.  There is also a bit 
> in sys.time.  I think that soft FP will not impact performance much if at 
> all.  

However, I think what you might want is:

(1) Mirage parts don't require floating point -- ideally a compiler flag 
combination for those portions to say "If it implies FP code generation, fail"
(2) Runtime and core OCaml libraries that can be linked against soft FP if 
desired, but can also use native FP if desired
(3) The ability for applications linked against Mirage to use FP natively for 
performance reason ... if desired.

That is: reduce or eliminate dependence on FP at the lowest levels of the 
system, but permit its use higher up if applications want it. If you're doing 
some FP-exploiting thing at the application level, definitely don't want to 
forbid its use of hardware FP!

Robert