On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 10:51:21AM -0500, Alex Villacís Lasso wrote:
1) In /proc/cpuinfo, I have seen the "vfp" flag. Does this
stand for "vector floating point", a FPU? Could there be other kinds of FPU that
might be reported as different flags?
Yes, but there's several variants of VFP provided by ARM cpus.
2) If an ARM chipset that is officially armv5tel can be guaranteed
to have a FPU (vfp or otherwise), can it boot an armv7hl userspace
with the same custom-built armv5tel kernel it used before? Do I have
to watch out for specific kernel compile options before attempting
this?
Broadly speaking "maybe" armv7hl requires vfp3-16, which is v3 VFP but
with only 16 registers, and not the full 32, so that we support marvell
and tegra chips. armv5tel only provides vfp2, which is missing some
vfp convert instructions. I suppose it would be possible to emulate them
but you're probably better off using pidora or rebuilding yourself.
--Kyle