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Re: SDL crashing



On Sunday 06 April 2003 01:10 am, you wrote:
> Done and done... well it doesnt crash anymore.  I dont know C
> nevermind gcc options, but i'm guess -mieee causes a float to
> go to 0 when an error occurs cause now some weird stuff
> happens in the game that i'm trying to play.  Like objects
> suddenly moving to the top left of the screen.  I guess
> beggars cant be choosers.

Many Alphas don't quite conform to IEEE754 floating-point specs 
wrt handling NaN and plus/minus infinity, at least not without 
help from the software ("software floating-point completion").  
With some floating-point apps, this causes unexpected behavior 
at run-time (like SIGFPE).  -mieee causes gcc to generate code 
where software FP completion can work.

-mieee _should_ make the software behave just as it would on x86 
or any IEEE754-compliant FPU.  It's not all that's required, 
though; the kernel has to properly trap floating-point 
exceptions and do the completion itself for this to fully work.  
-mieee just sets up the assembly code so that the kernel can do 
its part reliably.

(BTW, -mieee may cause a bit of a performance hit.  How much 
depends on your Alpha processor and the app itself, but 
generally I've seen it cause about a 5-10% hit on my EV56.  
AFAIK -mieee causes no performance hit on EV6 and later, but I 
have no such system.)

-- 
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"



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