Comment 4 for bug 303232

Catalin, we'd like to support the Thecus N2100 and other XScale IOP32x with the -iop32x kernel flavour. The N2100 has a IOP 80219 which is ARMv5TE and like you I think it lacks a FPU.

Debian uses -mfloat-abi=soft; I understand that using -mfloat-abi=softfp creates binaries which are compatible with Debian's, but there's a performance hit on systems which don't have a FPU as floating point instructions generate a kernel trap to emulate them.

Matthias, what's the current setup?

I don't mind tuning for ARMv7 at all (probably makes little difference), but the FPU question is harder: it's a big hit for systems without a FPU to meet fp instructions, and it's probably a comparable big win for systems with a FPU to use fp instructions instead of full soft emulation.
  Would it be possible to have two libgccs with one doing full software emulation, and another one using the FPU? This would probably allow us to use -mfloat-abi=soft and still benefit from the FPU to some degree on systems having one.