On Wed, 20 Sep 2017, Takashi Iwai wrote:
I'm trying to understand why it is critical to have hardware floating point support in this case. The pow() function is very resource hungry, true, but the function is only called when the plugin is loaded, and not for instance on every sample while the stream is running, so on the whole I would expect the impact to be minimal. Is there some other rationale that I'm missing?
The softfloat option is to avoid calculation in float as much as possible, i.e. alsa-lib will be built without any usage of math library.
"as much as possible" sounds like the softvol case would be a reasonable exception, on the other hand, if the goal is to completely avoid using the softfloat library I can see the point. Is the reason to avoid dependency issues, or to minimize the total resulting code size, especially on systems with limited memory?
/Ricard