On Thu, 1 Feb 1996, Ken Nakata wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Well, this isn't easy thing to say...
> 
> I'm thinking of stripping m68k FPE down a bit; especially, I want to
> pull the implemented transcendental functions out of FPE.
> 
> I'm not proud of what I've done in those functions, and quite frankly
> I don't think I'll ever do any better than that, either.  I can barely
> handle the seminumerical stuff like floating point add/sub/mul/div,
> and there's no way I'm going to beat the stability and speed of a
> proven technology (= Sun's libm).
> 
> Why don't we do the same thing they do for i386 port?  I.e. having the
> default libm not calling most FP instructions.  Of course, it's
> *theoretically* slower than calculating everything in the kernel...
> We could provide the user with two sets of libm, one directly using
> 68881 instructions, the other not (= default).
> 
> There are still some bugs in FPE, and I'd be feeling much easier and
> confident if all I have to debug is something I can understand.
> 
> I appreciate any comments.
> 
> ken
> 

I don't quite understand what exactly is being proposed here.  Could
you explain a little more?

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@eng.umd.edu
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