What's the difference between hard and soft floating point numbers?

Question

When I compile C code with my cross toolchain, the linker prints pages of warnings saying that my executable uses hard floats but my libc uses soft floats. What's the difference?

Answer 1

It sounds like your libc was built for software floating point operations while your exe was compiled assuming hardware support for floating point. In the short term, you could force soft floats as a compiler flag. (if you're using gcc I think it's -msoft-float)

Longer term, if your target's processor has hardware support for floating point operations you'll generally want to build or find a cross toolchain with hardware float enabled for speed. Some processor families have model variants some with and some without hardware support. So, for example, just saying your processor is an ARM is insufficient to know if you have hardware floating point support.

Answer 2

Hard floats use an on-chip floating point unit. Soft floats emulate one in software. The difference is speed. It's strange to see both used on the same target architecture, since the chip either has an FPU or doesn't. You can enable soft floating point in GCC with -msoft-float. You may want to recompile your libc to use hardware floating point if you use it.

Answer 3

There are three ways to do floating point arithmetic:

• Use float instructions if your CPU has a FPU. (fast)
• Have your compiler translate floating point arithmetic to integer arithmetic. (slow)
• Use float instructions and a CPU with no FPU. Your CPU will generate a exception (Reserved Instruction, Unimplemented Instruction or similar), and if your OS kernel includes a floating point emulator it will emulate those instructions (slowest).

Answer 4

The computation may be done either by floating-point hardware or in software based on integer arithmetic.

Doing it in hardware is much faster, but many microcontrollers don't have floating-point hardware. In that case you may either avoid using floating point (usually the best option) or rely on an implementation in software, which will be part of the C library.

In some families of controllers, for example ARM, the floating-point hardware is present in some models of the family but not in others, so gcc for these families supports both. Your problem seems to be that you mixed up the two options.