Re: Intel Pentium FDIV bug consequences

[Jean-Yves Migeon <jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost>]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010 10:46:37 +0100, RUMI Szabolcs <rumi_ml%rtfm.hu@localhost> 
wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Recently I had to revive an old Pentium based machine using
> NetBSD 5.0.1. The kernel warns me about the presence of the
> infamous FDIV bug but does it have any workarounds for this
> problem or it only prints this warning and it's up to the
> userland code to work around it somehow?
> 
> What I'm concerned about is that could this possibly affect
> the operation of compute-intensive crypto code like OpenSSL
> and similar in the form of some sporadic corruption in the
> data transferred over SSL for example?

I don't think that float instructions are of much use for crypto, and in
particular, OpenSSL. IMHO, they mostly use integer ops, and probably,
SIMD/MIMD optimizations.

-- 
Jean-Yves Migeon
jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost