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Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2016 18:29:45 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: David Edelsohn <dje.gcc@...il.com>
Cc: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Re: musl libc for PPC64

On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 06:24:27PM -0500, David Edelsohn wrote:
> You *can* use v2 ABI for BE, but there is no software to run.  There
> is no software or ecosystem or operating system that runs v2 ABI BE.
> It's not a hardware limitation, but there is no environment for the
> alternate combination.

Indeed. At this point there's no musl ecosystem for ppc64 at all
though; whatever we add is a fresh start.

> >> IBM has announced that the next generation of the processor will
> >> support native IEEE128 floating point in hardware.  There will be
> >> software emulation for the current processors.  Support is included in
> >> the forthcoming GCC 6.
> >
> > OK. Does the existing software emulation properly update the hardware
> > floating point status (exception flags) and use the rounding mode?
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean.  The software emulation assumes the
> hardware support is not present.  It doesn't mirror back the state to
> the processor in 64 bit mode.  But the emulation is fully IEEE128
> compliant.

if fesetround(FE_DOWNWARD) succeeds but then long double math still
rounds to nearest, that's not IEEE compliant.

The big obstacle to having fenv with softfloat on fully-softfloat
archs is the lack of register state for the rounding mode and
exception flags, so it should be possible to do this right as long as
the cpu has status/mode registers for single/double, which the
soft-quad code can then access/set. If this isn't done right already
we could either try to get it fixed in libgcc or punt and go with
ld64.

Rich

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