Re: [ECOS] Floating Point Register saves

[David Brennan <eCos at brennanhome dot com>]

Nick Garnett wrote:

> David Brennan <eCos@brennanhome.com> writes:
>
>  
>
> > According to the documentation in the i386 hal cdl documentation, it
> > states that by default eCos will "save and restore FPU state on every
> > thread switch, interrupt and exception." It states this in the option
> > for turning off lazy FPU switching. Our application uses floating
> > point registers in the DSR context. With Lazy FPU on, we get an
> > SIGFPE. (Which I guess is not surprising). So we have turned off lazy
> > FPU switching. With lazy FPU off, is it safe to use floating points in
> > DSR (or ISR) context? (We got burned by this earlier under VxWorks.)
> >    
>
> In theory using the FPU in ISRs and DSRs is allowed, there is code to
> save and restore the FPU state in both lazy and non-lazy
> configurations. Of course this has not been exercised very much and
> may contain bugs. You may have to some debugging.
>
> However, I would also question the need to do FP operations in ISRs
> and DSRs. These routines are meant to be fast and small. It is often
> better to offload any complex computations to a thread. Note that even
> if the DSR only does a small amount of FP computation, the cost of
> saving and restoring the FP state to let it do so is very high. 
>
>  
Ok, I doubt that we can use floating points in a ISR context with lazy 
FPU switching, since lazy FPU switching actually relies on an exception 
being caught. (But interrupts will be disabled.) So for now we turned 
off lazy FPU switching. We only install one interrupt driver, and it 
runs at a nominally slow 40 Hz (on a 1Ghz Celeron). However, in 
discussion with the team, we realized that this will also affect the 
Ethernet driver which probably did not need it. So we may be going back 
to some other method.  Which brings up the point, is there something 
like HAL_FPU_SAVE which is standard for needing to do an FPU 
save/restore? And can would this "register" with the FPU to prevent the 
Floating Point Exception?

As for using floating points in DSR context, we have a rich C++ wrapper 
around the operating system so our application rarely (if ever) needs to 
make OS calls. This wrapper uses floating point timers. (Actually 
internally they are done in ticks, but the external access is in 
seconds.) Therefore, if I need to access a timer (even to check its 
value, or see if it has timed out, we end up using floating points.)

Thanks
David Brennan


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