Re: manipulating FPU rounding modes on alpha
On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 09:41:56PM +0200, Joachim Reichel wrote:
> I'm maintaining cgal (non-free), a package for computational geometry
> that requires manipulating the FPU rounding mode for some math
> operations. I need some help concerning an alpha specific problem.
>
> It turned out that the FPU rounding macros in 3.3-1 didn't work on alpha
> (search for ERROR in [1]). Uwe Schindler kindly allowed me to use his
> alpha machine to debug the problem. I found out that the software
> contained #ifdef's with specific macros for alpha. These macros didn't
> work (I don't know whether they never worked or don't work any longer).
> The generic macros from glibc worked.
>
> Based on this I uploaded 3.3-2 using the generic macros from glibc. But
> when the package was build on the buildd, the test failed again [2].
> Unfortunately, it went unnoticed.
>
> Now upstream released 3.3.1 also using the generic glibc macros. And
> again, the test failed [3].
>
> I just build the package manually, and the test succeeds!
>
> I have no clue how to debug this problem. The test works if the package
> is build manually, but fails on the buildd (ds10). I have no experience
> with alpha and don't know how to track this down.
>
> Could someone try to build the package manually and see if it fails?. It
> would be helpful to have a machine where the build fails when the
> package is build manually.
>
> One difference is that Uwe's machine runs current testing (libc6.1-dev
> 2.6.1-1), while the buildd uses older versions (libc6.1-dev_2.6-2 for
> 3.3-2 and libc6.1-dev_2.6-5 for 3.3.1-1) [4]
>
> Has someone a chroot environment with libc6.1-dev 2.6 (not 2.6.1)? A
> build failure in such a environment would indicate that the older glibc
> might cause the problem.
>
> Let me know if you need further information.
Is this possibly a result of the switch to ldbl128 that happened around
the end of may/beginning of june on alpha, powerpc, sparc and s390?
This is where 'long double' changed from being 64bit to being 128bit.
After you start to support 128bit floating point numbers, rounding might
be affected on things that expect only 64bit.
--
Len Sorensen
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