difference between hard float and soft

[jakebpg]

What's the difference between the hard float and the regular image on the download page?

Never heard the term hard float before and am just wondering.

Thanks in advance

[joan]

Hard float just means the floating point calculations are done by on chip hardware rather than being emulated by software.

[Mr.Dave]

Easy to remember:

Soft=Slow
Hard=Fast

[jakebpg]

Thanks guys.

As I said never heard the term before in my15+ years in the IT industry

[redhawk]

Hard float and soft float is pretty much comparable to Intel based machines performing float point calculations in hardware (80x87 maths co-processor) or using software (float point emulation).
Hardware float point calculations will win every time on speed, however if you processor cannot float or perform this correctly i.e. Cyrix 486 or early Pentiums then software emulation is a life saver

Richard S.

[pepedog]

Aside from hardware differences, on the rpi archlinuxarm soft boots to command prompt in 24 seconds, hard in 10.
Probably most of the gain is from changing from init to systemd.
x86 stuff I have played with that is without co-processor are 8086, 386, 486SX, don't know about my Pentium60

[mikerr]

About 10x

[tawalker]

Aside from hardware differences, on the rpi archlinuxarm soft boots to command prompt in 24 seconds, hard in 10.
Probably most of the gain is from changing from init to systemd.
x86 stuff I have played with that is without co-processor are 8086, 386, 486SX, don't know about my Pentium60

I've just done a fresh install of "hard float" Arch/ARM on my Pi, and it configured itself to use systemd instead of initscripts. The system does seem to boot and run noticeably faster than the old "soft float" version, and I suspect systemd may play a part in that.

Even though I'm trying XFCE this time around (I used Fluxbox on the old install), performance feels smoother and quicker - wonder how fast Fluxbox will run on this setup?

[mrhobbeys]

From the sounds of it no one should ever use soft float?

[pepedog]

V5 soft float will remain, there are other (headless) arm devices that are speedier than the raspberrypi, Linux is about choice

[billb]

When building from source are there any particular flags we should set for hard float? Or is this taken care of automatically? (I'm using Raspbian wheezy)

[pepedog]

If you use makepkg, it's taken care of.
Flags are in /etc/makepkg.conf