Compiling OpenCV part 2

Compiling without profiling

This time I compiled OpenCV library on Debian Linux installation.

I used VMWare 6.5 and Debian OS linux distribution.

I setup Virtual Machine to allocate 10GB hard drive space and 512 MB of system memory.

I setup the latest version of CodeSourcery G++ toolchain (version arm-2008q3-72-arm-none-linux-gnueabi) downloaded from http://www.codesourcery.com/sgpp/lite/arm. The installation dir was /opt/crosstool/codesourcery

I played with two ARM9-based single board computers (SBC) recently to investigate how OpenCV would operate on embedded platforms. The SBCs are – TS-7800 and SBC2440-III.

OpenCV uses floating point operations a lot, but not all of the ARM processors have FP coprocessor, so developers should use either some FP library, or as in my case – use Linux kernel FP emulation. There are two types of such emulation OABI and EABI. More details can be found here and here. Kernel release 2.6.16 was the first one to include ARM EABI support.

Unfortunately, CPUs of both SBCs do not support floating point in hardware, but luckily enough, TS-7800 has Debian Linux with 2.6.21 kernel. So I had a chance to compare OpenCV performance for OABI and EABI.

Both SBCs have necessary tool-chains in package – TS-7800 has Linux and Windows(Cygwin) tool-chains, SBC-2440 – only Linux one.  In addition to these I downloaded newer release of Codesourcery ARM tool-chain for Windows, because the one from TS-7800 SW package didn’t work properly with Cygwin.