On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 04:05:40PM -0400, Rick Genter wrote: > Question for the lists: does it make sense to pursue a software floating > point solution as opposed to trapping floating point instructions?
It does make sense -- on a broken LC040. On 'regular' machines that do
have a working FPU, using the FPU is preferable, as it is (obviously)
much faster.
> My guess to the answer would be no, as I suspect that 99.9%+ of the
> code that runs in Linux (both in the kernel and in userland) does not
> use floating point, but if that's wrong, I'd be interested in hearing
> opposing viewpoints.
Floating points are used in places where you wouldn't expect them. When
I tried to install Debian on piper, my Centris 610, even apt-get didn't
work. I can't imagine why a package manager would need floating point
instructions, but it seems to be used...
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