Nope.
I don't think you lived through the horror of Minix and having
user-space FP emulation. It's a horrible pain - either overloading
SIGFPE with all that implies, or another magic hidden signal with ld.so
loading a FP library on demand etc - and then core-dumps tend to be
impossible to figure out etc etc.
So it definitely was a lot better off in kernel space - the user space
solution would just have made everybody go slightly mad after the five
hundreth bug in some shared library configuration. With the kernel
solution there were no surprising interactions, just a lot of reasonably
complex code that had mostly been written earlier anyway.
HOWEVER, it may be that times have changed, and that it _now_ would be
better off in user space simply because it's almost never an issue any
more, and user space can do some hacks that you can't do in kernel space
due to security reasons etc.
At the same time it also doesn't really matter any more. I don't think
the FP emulator has been changed in the last year or so, and it works.
It has some slightly painful issues with fp state saving etc, but they
are at least _solved_ issues.
Linus
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