Re: System Panic Makes My Life Easier

I wrote:

> Right around the year 1999 or 2000, my wife Deirdre had a puzzling
> problem with Linux on an AMD-based system of that day:  The 'man'
> command segfaulted, as did 'ls' if you used certain options to that
> command, but not otherwise.  This was practically a black swan event,
> but someone on a Linux mailing list managed to identify the root cause:
> The CPU's floating point circuitry was wonky, with the result that
> /usr/bin/man's calculations that it uses for formatting broke, and the
> command segfaulted.  I don't know what the exact function in 'ls' was
> that had the same problem, but it was something on that approximate
> order of things.

Forgot to say:  I believe those were ANSI-dictated math functions in
libc (as opposed to non-ANSI-dictated math functions relegated to
libm.so.1 for obscure Unix-historical reasons).  So, that was a rare
case of selective software sensitivity to a CPU problem -- but even then
its expression was limited to libc.