Re: SIGFPE and -mieee

[Tyson Whitehead <twhitehe@uwo.ca>]

I wrote the original email after a week that went something like this.

Day #1:
  Hummm, let's browse the web.  Oh, Konqueor SIGFPEs.
  A good portion of the rest of the day spent recompiling.
Day #2:
  Hummm, let's import an Excel spreadsheet.  Oh, KSpread SIGFPEs.
  A good portion of the rest of the day spent recompiling.
Day #3:
  Hummm, let's create a presentation.  Oh, KPresenter SIGFPEs.
  A good portion of the rest of the day spent recompiling.
Day #4:
  Hummm, let's listen to some music.  Oh, mpg321 SIGFPEs.
  Hummm, let's view that video.  Oh, Xine SIGFPEs.
etc...

By the term default, I was referring to the 95% (probably more like 99%) of 
the (11858) Debian packages that you won't be using to perform your 30 day 
numerical simulations.  The user/desktop applications.

If you guys have figured out that ATLAS/BLAS, LAPACK, etc, runs fine without 
-mieee, that's fine by me.  In my books those apps/libs are all highly 
specialized.  I expect the package maintainers to use non-default compilation 
flags (i.e. to specify things like -O6 *grin*, -fstrict-aliasing, and not 
things like -mieee).

So, I ask again, could we make -mieee the default (i.e. applying it to the 99% 
of the apps where optimization means specifying -O3 and not -g)?

-T

PS:  As was mentioned earlier, isn't the point of not using -mieee kind of 
irrelevant anyway, as modern Alapha architectures (i.e. 21264 [ev6] and 
later) aren't slowed down by imprecise exception handling anyway (trapb 
instructions are simply dropped)?

-- 
 Tyson Whitehead  (-twhitehe@uwo.ca -- WSC-)
 Computer Engineer                          Dept. of Applied Mathematics,
 Graduate Student- Applied Mathematics      University of Western Ontario,
 GnuPG Key ID# 0x8A2AB5D8                   London, Ontario, Canada