adams@ucunx1.san.uc.edu (J. Adams - SunOS Wizard) (04/06/91)
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@ucunix.san.uc.edu University of Cincinnati College of Medicine <<This space for rent>> The watched tape never streams..............