In message <9608282304.ZM5860@physig4.ph.kcl.ac.uk>
          "Mark Brinicombe" <amb@physig4.ph.kcl.ac.uk> wrote:

> >I've got some (v1.1) binaries which compiled but don't run (on
> >v1.1) because of the 'floating point exeption'. Any suggests ???
> 
> What is the number of the floating point exeption ?
> doing things with NaN's Inf or divide by zero will cause exceptions.
> On a number of systems there errors do not cause exceptions and you just
> get NaN or Inf results.

I've not mentioned this one before, partly because I'm sure you are
aware of it. When enquire.c (from the gcc source) is run it core dumps
due to a floating point underflow (ISTR) when it is trying to calculate
the smallest floating point value (largest -ve exponent). At the time a
signal handler has been installed for SIGFPE but it never gets called
and a FP exception is raised. Has this been fixed (i.e., the signal
handler gets called) in the 1.2 kernel ?

> >Can someone tell me the current state of shared libaries ?
> 
> Non-existant ....
> 
> Ok The stumbling block on shared libraries is -fpic.
> To build shared libraries we need position independant code. Currently
> GCC/arm does not support the -fpic options so we cannot do this.
> 
> Solution: Somebody needs to write PIC support for GCC/arm
> 
> In the kernel team it would be either me or Rob who would look at that.
> I have the kernel, 1.2 and everything else to do
> rob has X11 to do so neither of us has the time.
> 
> This means all we can do is waiting until a release of GCC has -fpic for ARM.
> 
> I don't know whether anyone (Pete B.?) has any info on if this is likely to
> happen soon.
> 
> If someone would like to do this great ...

I just don't have any spare time at the moment to examine PIC support
for GCC. In fact I don't seem to even have any spare time to run RiscBSD
either :-(. I hope Richard will do PIC support for us. I don't think
Nick is working on it either and he is also probably hoping Richard will
do it. I suspose there is a possibility that Cygnus will do it since
they know they compiler very well and are supposed to provide support
for some ARM/GCC combination. We can but hope.

Perhaps if no-one has done it by the winter (when the sailing season is
a lot quieter) I might look at it (no promises though, since it'll be
the skiing season!).

regards,
Pete (B).