The current Debian port creates hardfloat FPA instructions. FPA comes from
"Floating Point Accelerator." Since the FPA floating point unit was implemented
only in very few ARM cores, these days FPA instructions are emulated in kernel
via Illegal instruction faults. This is of course very inefficient: about 10
times slower that -msoftfloat for a FIR test program. The FPA unit also has the
peculiarity of having mixed-endian doubles, which is usually the biggest grief
for ARM porters, along with structure packing issues.