RE: kernel 2.4.9-34 ia64 bugfix list?

>>>>> On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 13:49:35 +0100, Daniel Kidger <[email protected]> said:


  Daniel> yes - but note that you get "floating point assist faults"
  Daniel> when for example your application code has the odd
  Daniel> underflow.  A side-effect is that messages get written to
  Daniel> the console and even /var/log/messages (caused just by
  Daniel> normal round-off in a scientific application!).

  Daniel> The result is the code goes slowly - in one case of ours the
  Daniel> code run 13 times slower than it should.

The code doesn't run slowly _because_ of the console messages.  The
console messages warn you that the code will run slowly because the
faults take some time to emulate.  (Note that the console logging is
rate-limited; you'll never see more than one message per second on
average.)

  Daniel> If you set the
  Daniel> flush-to-zero flag in the FPU, it runs at full speed
  Daniel> again. You can do this either by an assember call or options
  Daniel> like -ftz to the intel itanium compilers.

Yes, that's often a good idea.  For gcc, the option -ffast-math has
the same effect.

	--david