9 Jul
2024
9 Jul
'24
8:43 a.m.
On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 8:41 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
Not floating point, per se, but there's things like AESNI that use special
registers
that are akin to floating point (I can't recall if they are shared with the
FP registers
or not off the top of my head). For doing crypto fast, these are often
used. The same
the same facilities that FP uses to save/restore them on context switches.
Warner
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.
When it comes down to it, why would a kernel need floating point? Or are
you talking about the distribution instead of the OS?