Re: floating point emulation broken

["Toru Nishimura" <locore64%alkyltechnology.com@localhost>]

Paul Koning said;

> > fp.S was inherited from pre-NetBSD project and the maintainance has
> > been in abandoned state for many years. The assembler implementation
> is unlikely fixable, 
>
> I agree.  fp.S emulates MIPS-2 float, which means that it doesn't do
> any good for anything compiled to a newer target.

In fact, fp.S itself is a sort of an archaic heritage.  It emulates R2010, the
original MIPS FPU as a standalone math coprocessor.  fp.S was written
for DECstaiton 3100.

> In our case here, we dropped it 3-4 years ago and switched to 
> a NOFLOAT kernel with soft-float in userland.  For an embedded
> system that's a much cleaner solution and it avoids having to fight
> with the compiler when you want a newer integer instruction set.

Quite reasonable since the main stream has been FPU-less MIPS32.  Note
that full scale FPemul is *mandatory* even for FPU-equipped processors
since FP circuit potentially emits exceptions when it detects imprecise
math condition to ask SW intervention for recovery... 

Toru Nishimura / ALKYL Technology