Dynamic Link Softfloat Core On Sharp/cacko

[iamasmith]

Hi,

Recently having installed PocketWorkstation I noticed the simple way that the PocketWorkstation seperates out all file system activity using chroot against a portion of the storage card.

I was wondering about the feasibility of building a squashfs that contained core Qtopia and stdc++ etc. etc. (built with vfp) and using chroot as a means of sandboxing this environment for apps linked against it - all built with vfp support to get out and out performance without static linkage of the Qtopia environment.

Static links out of the environment, pointing at mount points in flash could be used to locate the installations of games etc built with this core so they could be installed independently of being packaged into the game core squashfs. - Then possibly use a standard wrapper script for these apps to launch the core before starting the app.

The only real question is what form does the IPC take between the Qtopia client and the server...? Is this a socket of some sort or is there another mechanism in use.... just trying to think about what happens in a chrooted environment and what parts of the 'host' environment we may have to expose via mount point or other to get access to the native Qtopia display server that is already rendering the GUI.

Anyway, anyone think that there is potential here? Got a better insight into the issues?

I know that this should help to make apps like Quake and MPlayer more feasible in footprint.

What's the potential beyond that? is it worth a go?

- Andy

[iamasmith]

*BUMP*

Can't believe nobody is interested in this.... I think this is fairly 'low hanging fruit' and would yield a good core for gaming/mm.

[TimW]

Not quite the same thing but might be useful for adding some performance for individual apps....

Has anyone tried linking apps compiled for soft-float against the libfloat that comes with the personal profile version of java from Sun? I'm assuming that you would get a similar performance increase for just those apps whilst retaining compatability with everything else.

If this is feasible then all you need to do is compile the games against libfloat rather than chrooting the whole environment. (I'd be content with a version of python compiled this way - but I'd take the games, too 8^) )

[iamasmith]

Been there, done that (libfloat)...

The problem with -msoft-float +libfloat is that the floating point ABI changes when you compile soft float so none of the maths functions work any more  from libm.so and many of the libc functions also fail so unfortunately you only end up with a very limited range of things that do work. (the Qtopia developer threads on porting Quake talk about this in more detail).

I found this quite disappointing as it would be reasonable to assume you could use FPE for library stuff and libfloat in your own project calling FPE libraries.. afraid not - the change in ABI stuffs this