About floating‑point support

The ARM floating‑point environment is an implementation of the IEEE 754 standard for binary floating‑point arithmetic. See IEEE 754 arithmetic for more information on the ARM implementation of the standard.

An ARM system might have:

If you compile for a system with a hardware VFP coprocessor, the ARM compiler makes use of it. If you compile for a system without a coprocessor, the compiler implements the calculations in software.

For example, the compiler option ‑‑fpu=vfp selects a hardware VFP coprocessor and the option ‑‑fpu=softvfp specifies that arithmetic operations are to be performed in software, without the use of any coprocessor instructions.

See Chapter 4 Floating‑point Support for more information.