On 13 August 2012 17:25, Peter heronpeak@gmail.com wrote:

I would like to run Ubuntu 12.04 on a A9 Cortex-MP/armv7-a development system that has *no FPU* hardware floating point unit.

Does this mean the entire toolchain needs to be recompiled?

Ubuntu 12.04 assumes VFP is present. You might be able to recompile the whole thing with a toolchain configured for softfloat, but that is definitely not a supported thing from the Ubuntu side.

You can run regular Ubuntu userspace using kernel VFP emulation, but that will be _really_ slow.

Could you please shed light on appropriate settings (toolchain and/or kernel) soft FPU emulation related options for armv7-a without a FPU?

To build a softfloat gcc, pass --with-float=soft to configure. Build the kernel as usual, nothing special is required there.