On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Richard Earnshaw wrote:

> So, to the question.  If I knock up a hack to the compiler and assembler 
> so that for NetBSD/ARM/ELF they change to a pure little-endian floating 
> point format, would there be any objections?

I don't think I'd grumble very much, since it's clearly the right way to
go.  I'd like -mhard-float still to work on FPA systems, though.

> I haven't tested it, but I believe the patch to the compiler is trivial.  
> In the arm/netbsd/elf header file, after including arm.h (probably 
> indirectly), we simply add
> 
> #undef FLOAT_WORDS_BIG_ENDIAN

I think you need a way to switch this at runtime, so as to be able to
support FPA-style hard-float as well.

> For the assembler, for the rare cases where assembly language contains 
> .double (gcc never generates this), we just have to change the following 
> loop in md_atof() so that it spits out the `words' in the order 3210:

Hmm.  I suspect this means the assembler needs a run-time option to switch
FP formats too.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26               <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>