[COFF] Re: Data types in operating systems

I don't know of any OSes that use floating point.

But the IBM operating systems for S/360/370 did use packed decimal instructions in a few places. This was an issue for the System/360 model 44. The model 44 was essentially a model 40 but with the (much faster) model 65's floating point hardware. It was intended as a reduced-cost high-performance technical computing machine for small research outfits. To keep the cost down, the model 44 lacked the packed decimal arithmetic instructions, which of course are not needed in HPTC. But that meant that off-the-shelf OS/360 would not run on the 44. It had its own OS called PS/44. IIRC VAX/VMS ran into similar issues when the microVAX architecture was adopted. To save on chip real estate, microVAX did not implement packed decimal, the complicated character string instructions, H-floating point, and some other exotica (such as CRC) in hardware. They were emulated by the OS. For performance reasons it behooved one to avoid those data types and instructions on later VAXen. I once traced a severe performance problem to a subroutine where there were only a few instructions that weren't generating emulator faults. The culprit was the oddball conversion semantics of PL/I, which caused what should have been D-float arithmetic to be done in 15-digit packed decimal. Once I fixed that the program ran 100 times faster.