Generally it shouldn't, and didn't. But Perl assumed you had hardware floating point, because most architectures did--including S/390--but Perl on Linux further assumed IEEE 754 floating point, which was implemented in software on the S/390 (the hardware FP was IBM FP), and, on small and pokey machines, was really quite slow.
Adam
On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 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?
-- Dave