Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 7 Feb 1997 20:56:51 -0500 | | From | "David S. Miller" <> | | Subject | Re: MMX for kernel |
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Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 20:34:04 -0500 From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
Yes, that'd be useful; it'd make it much easier to note that a process has never used the FPU at all. It also avoids disturbing the FPU registers each time a process starts up.
I don't know, it seems to me the most sensible place to do all this is indeed in the kernel when the user touches the fpu himself the first time. We can provide whatever initial state is mandated on a particular architecture.
This is in fact what we do now on the Sparc, provide a zero floating point status register, and all fpu registers set to "all 1's" (aka signaling NAN's).
I am perplexed as to why things aren't done this way on Intel and Libc does this sort of setup in both libc5 and glibc2. Perhaps there is some reason for it.
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