dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) (09/23/87)
I have several AT clones running Microport. There have been published problems wth the FPE bug in Microport's UNIX but I am bothered by the fact that only *some* of my machines exhibit the problem even though they are identical *except* the source of the 80287 chips! Could it be (like the unscrupulous reselling of faulty 80386 chips that Intel admitted to in Infoworld Sept. 21st ed.) that this particular reseller has sold faulty 80287s that meet specs on math but don't handle exceptions correctly? Obviously, my MS-DOS test suites pass as they use good data and floating point exceptions in DOS cause a crash--like DOS is prone to do anyway. But under UNIX, the improper FPE handling causes UNIX to hang. Normally I'd suspect Microport, but why only on some of my machines? And more suspiciously, why are the "problem" machines all retro 80287s from the same vendor? Hmmm... Any similar experiences or confirmation of Intel selling junk parts? -- David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc. ...!{seismo}!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave "The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll