[alsa-devel] alsa-lib and floating point support

Ricard Wanderlof ricard.wanderlof at axis.com
Wed Sep 20 16:45:46 CEST 2017


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
-- 
Ricard Wolf Wanderlöf                           ricardw(at)axis.com
Axis Communications AB, Lund, Sweden            www.axis.com
Phone +46 46 272 2016                           Fax +46 46 13 61 30


More information about the Alsa-devel mailing list