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@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).