3.51 math library

J. Adams - SunOS Wizard adams at ucunx1.san.uc.edu
Sat Apr 6 03:18:49 AEST 1991


There was considerable discussion some time ago concerning the broken
floating point implementation on the UNIX-PC.  I posted a patch that
corrects the HUGE value (on OSU), but this does nothing about the other
problems.  Unfortunately, nobody has had time to sit down and develop a
replacement. 

Interestingly, the SunOS 4.1.1 software floating point library passes
Paranoia with flying colors.  This led to the following idea.  I don't
have time to pursue it myself, but somebody might want to look into it.

Since we have source for GNU ld, it seems like it might be possible for
somebody with a Sun 3 to hack a version of GNU ld that takes SunOS
object files as input and generates UNIX-PC COFF relocatable files as
output.  If this were done, one could simply "compile" empty headers
that force the soft_float routines to be loaded and produce
relocatable output files in COFF format.

I assume the resulting binaries could be freely distributed, since they
don't involve reverse-engineering the Sun code and are effectively no
different from any other binary which contains linked-in library code.

I don't know if this would work, but in principle it might provide a
starting point to get a decent floating point emulation for the UNIX-PC.

-- 
       Jim Adams              Department of Physiology and Biophysics
adams at ucunix.san.uc.edu     University of Cincinnati College of Medicine      
<<This space for rent>>     The watched tape never streams..............



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