Re: Use of floating point in the kernel

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> > 
> > There are a few instances of use of floating point in 2.6,
> 
> Has anyone considered asking the gcc people to add an -fno-fpu (or 
> -mno-fpu) option, throwing an error if any FP instructions are used?

We really should, but there really are some rare cases where it is 
actually ok.

In particular, you _can_ do math, if you just do the proper
"kernel_fpu_begin()"/"kernel_fpu_end()" around it, and you have reason to 
believe that you can assume a math processor exists. 

Is it needed? I dunno. I'd frown on it in general, but I don't see it 
being fundamentally wrong under the rigth circumstances.

		Linus
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