Re: floating point woes on i386

Jörg Sonnenberger <[email protected]> Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:31 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.userlevel
Message-ID <[email protected]>

On 9/30/25 9:30 AM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> At Sat, 27 Sep 2025 10:36:59 +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger <[email protected]> wrote:
> Subject: Re: floating point woes on i386
>>
>> On 9/26/25 5:50 PM, RVP wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 25 Sep 2025, Greg Troxel wrote:
>>>
>>>> I ran paranoia (pkgsrc/benchmarks/paranoia) on 9 and 10.  On 9:
>>>>
>>>>   The number of  FAILUREs  encountered =       3.
>>>>   The number of  SERIOUS DEFECTs  discovered = 4.
>>>>   The number of  DEFECTs  discovered =         3.
>>>>   The number of  FLAWs  discovered =           2.
>>>>
>>>> which is shocking, especially as I remember earlier NetBSD i386 versions
>>>> being ok, like 5 or 7.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Force strict standards compliance with
>>> `-std=c89' or `-std=c99', or pass the
>>> `-fexcess-precision=standard' flag to the compiler.
>>
>> There is on newer i386 also the option of
>> using -mfpmath=sse. That's strictly
>> speaking the only way to get IEEE754
>> semantics on i386.
> 
> On NetBSD/i386 10.0 with the system's GCC-10.5 the -mfpmath=sse option
> doesn't actually do anything:

Well, of course. You also need to use a CPU that supports SSE2 and/or 
enable the feature with -msse2.

Joerg