VFP/NEON with Basic Assembler on the BeagleBoard ?

Hi there,

I’m curious on getting an BeagleBoard, but first I got to know if I can use the new instructions provided by VFP and NEON within the Basic Assembler (or GCC ?) ?

Is see on Terje Slettebo’s site a test for Beagle Board owners -> Link

Does it work ?

Or are there any other Basic-Assembler kind of Hello-World-Applications for VFP or NEON that I can look at ?

BASIC: Not yet. In fact, we could do with someone to update the assembler, if you’re feeling up to the challenge ;)

GCC: I believe the assembler in the current version (4.1.1) supports all the ARMv6 instructions. So you’ll get VFP but no NEON. If you want NEON then you can try the 4.1.2 test version that was released a couple of months ago. That should support pretty much all the ARMv7 instructions.

Is see on Terje Slettebo’s site a test for Beagle Board owners -> Link

Does it work ?

Yes, it works :)

Or are there any other Basic-Assembler kind of Hello-World-Applications for VFP or NEON that I can look at ?

None that I know of.

The only useful thing I can tell you at the moment is that I haven’t yet had a chance to finish off the first version of the VFPSupport module. So you’ll have to enable the VFP/NEON coprocessor manually (see below code – should compile OK with extASM), and there won’t be any automatic context switching (so don’t try running two VFP/NEON apps at the same time from within the Wimp!)

SWI OS_EnterOS
MRC CP15,0,R0,C1,C0,2
ORR R0,R0,#&F<<20
MCR CP15,0,R0,C1,C0,2
ISB SY
MOV R0,#1<<30
VMSR FPEXC,R0
MSR CPSR_c,#&10