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2. ARM Floating Point Software

ARM distributes a software development toolkit, that contains a set of floating point libraries that can be used to construct an emulator. These libraries I believe are licensed from Acorn by ARM for inclusion in their toolkit. It is however expensive, and source is not available without a source licence from ARM. Consequently open source development projects like Linux and NetBSD contain no source for a floating point emulator.

So how do various systems deal with the lack of floating point hardware? Acorn developed their own emulator from scratch for their RISC operating systems. The ARM port of NetBSD has a unique solution; the binary object code for the ARM floating pointing routines was converted into a text file of hexidecimal numbers. Some assembler glue is added to the file and the assembler is then used to convert the file back to binary form. Hence the NetBSD kernel, contains source of a sort, although it is unreadable and not maintainable. Russell King distributes a port of the Acorn floating point emulator that is compatible with ARM Linux kernels.


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