QUERY : why is -mno-fpu deprecated when we need it for integer only software?

["Aaron P. D'Souza" <adsouzp at gmail dot com>]

good day Nick:

Pablo Bleyer Kocik has built GCC 4.2.2 and i am testing this for
the previous 2 bugs - 6726, 6727 - that i reported.

i have one question for you: apparently, in 2003, you made a change
to prevent -mno-fpu from being passed to GAS.

ARM: Do not pass -mno-fpu to the assembler
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2003-04/msg00593.html

why was that?

this is what i get currently when i assemble a file from the latest
GNUARM release:

arm-elf-as -mno-fpu -march=armv4t -mcpu=arm7tdmi -mthumb-interwork \
      -o FirstAsm.o FirstAsm.s
Assembler messages:
option `-mno-fpu' is deprecated: use either -mfpu=softfpa or
-mfpu=softvfp

arm-elf-gcc -O0 -march=armv4t -mcpu=arm7tdmi -mthumb-interwork   \
   -mthumb -c -o SecondC.o SecondC.c

i am currently developing software that does not use any FP for a
processor that has the ARM7TDMI core with no FPU. we do not want to
mess with soft and hard FPU libraries when we do not need them.

we are concerned that by using -msoft-float the calling convention
is changed and that we have to recompile libgcc.a all over again.

why mess with FP when we dont need it at all? the -mno-fpu solves
the problem quite neatly.

Aaron
--
{tel: +91-20-6526-7076; cell: +91-9970-591-079; fax: +1-800-450-5419}