Dear Kyle Moffett,
In message 1298479238-22114-1-git-send-email-Kyle.D.Moffett@boeing.com you wrote:
Standard Debian powerpc and powerpcspe systems only include hard-float libgcc in their native compilers, which causes scary build warnings when building U-Boot.
Debian and other PowerPC-supporting distributions used to provide libgcc and other libraries in a "nof" (soft-float) form in the "multilib" packages. As they were completely unused by the distribution and therefore tended to be very buggy it was decided to save some time on the part of the maintainers and build-servers by removing them.
Admittedly, right now the linker warnings do not indicate any problems, as the included routines do not use any floating point at all.
The concern is that if floating-point code were ever added it might cause hard-float code to be unexpectedly included in U-Boot without generating a hard error. This would cause unexplained crashes or indeterminate results at runtime.
The easiest way to resolve this is to borrow the routines that U-Boot needs from the Linux kernel, which has the same issue.
Specifically, the routines are: _ashldi3(), _ashrdi3(), and _lshrdi3().
Sorry, but I cannot follow your logic.
First, we do not use floating point in U-Boot. We don't. Period. [The only exception being well-designed and hand-crafted assemby code where it is unavoidable - for example in the POST code to test the FPU, or for certain atomic 64 bit stores].
So FP support should never be a reason for such a change.
What confuses me completely is why you then add some shift functions, which are completely unrelated to FP operations.
[I think I know what you mean, but your explanation is confusing and should be fixed.]
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk