9 Jul
2024
9 Jul
'24
6:08 a.m.
Indeed, S/390 Linux ran just fine on machines without IEEE floating point.
Which meant that for years I had to jam `use integer` at the top of any
Perl I ran, because otherwise any Perl arithmetic at all would go through
the software float routines, which was very painful on little machines,
such as a P/390.
Adam
On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 3:37 PM Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> wrote:
When I was tech editing "Operating Systems
Concepts", tenth edition,
around seven years ago, I downloaded the Linux source and searched all .c
and .h files for float and double. There aren't any. Linux does not require
floating point support, and that's likely true of other operating systems,
where performance is key. It also means that Linux can run on RISC
V without floating point support (I know the basic CPU doesn't include it).