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SubjectRe: Linux and the lame FPU-ptrace function
   From: Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs@hpc.uh.edu>
Date: 17 Jul 1997 19:39:21 -0500

AT> Your knowledge exceeds your tact. If it weren't so condensending, I
AT> would have loved to help.

Oh, come on. Now we're being overly sensitive. His question is very
appropriate; why should he work on something if nobody cares about it
enough to make use of it or if it has zero chance of making it into the
kernel?

One of the problems that we're having is that the linux-kernel list is
not necessarily sending out mail messages in order. I only received
Stephen's message in its entirety long after Jason sent his rebuke to the
list.

(This is one of the reasons why I always leave enough quoting in context
so that everyone can understand my messages, because I know the mailings
sometimes don't get sent out in order. For example, although I've seen
bits and pieces of Linus's announcement of 2.1.45 quoted in other
people's e-mail, I *still* haven't seen the original e-mail message.
It's been much worse than usual lately; I wonder if it's related to the
Internic's DNS screwup.)


Anyway, here's Stephen's original message as an example of how *not* to
win friends and influence people.... It's another example of how we
have far too many spoiled brats as users who don't realize that people
work on Linux as a labor of love....


- Ted

>Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 10:09:40 -0500
>From: Stephen Polkowski <stephen@centtech.com>
>
> I've been using linux for about a year now
>and I'm still amazed gdb still can't debug the simple
>x86 fpu stack. If you don't believe me, type
>"info float" under gdb. At first glance, you might
>think that its just a gdb problem. It isn't.
>
> Linux doesn't support it, or rather, the
>ptrace function doesn't support the dumping of the
>fpu state. I can't imagine how Linux has evolved
>without having a serious fpu debugger. Oh well.
>
> I really enjoy linux, so I've decided to fix
>this problem. As it turns out, I discovered that a
>"real" company called Absoft had to do their own kernel
>hack for ptrace so that they could develop and debug
>their Fortran product. This is unacceptible!!! Linux
>needs to be real operating system with a real way
>to debug it's fpu hardware state.
>
> So, I have the Absoft hack and I've looked
>at the problem. The hack is not complete. It assumes that you have an
>x86 fpu, so this would break on a
>386 system.
>
> So, who wants to help me out, and how does one
>get a patch into the official linux source code? Does
>anyone really care about this? Thanks for your help.



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