Re: FP emulation patch available

["Jay Carlson" <nop@nop.com>]

> Bradley D. LaRonde (brad@ltc.com) writes (re the FPA emulator out of
> Algorithmics via Kevin Kissell):
>
> > I would jump right on this but I really need it for 2.3.47+.
>
> It's good to see our donation to the Linux project being taken up
> enthusiastically , but didn't SGI have some code like this?  I mean,
> you can't have a serious MIPS run-time system without an FP emulator,
> can you?

quoting from softftp.S from 2.3.19:

 * For now it's just a crude hack good enough to run certain fp programs
like
 * Mozilla.

It's just dealing with denorms, NaNs, etc as inputs.  AFAIK NetBSD was no
better until pretty recently.

Whether Linux or NetBSD, as systems, were ever serious MIPS run-time
systems---well, you wrote the book, so I'm inclined to get out of the
argument.

>From my LinuxCE perspective, a full FP emu is fairly important for getting
binary compatibility back with mainline Linux/MIPS---we've been in the
softfp ghetto.  But most of what we do with FP is, uh, keep /bin/df happy
when it tries to calculate the percentage of free disk space, and the like.
And dropping softfp means we don't *have* to maintain a forked
toolchain/libc.

(of course, getting rid of softfp makes mips16 more...interesting...)

Jay