libm problems: log(9.8813129168249309e-324) = -infinity

[Mark Dickinson <dickinsm@gmail.com>]

I've encountered what seems to be a math library bug in
Debian unstable running on an alpha machine. I'd like to
file a bug report, but the big problem is that I don't have
access to the machine itself:  it's a Python buildbot:

http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/3.0/alpha%20Debian%203.0

 I can't even get much information about the hardware
or software:  the  host information is given as: "Alpha
build daemon running Debian unstable" which doesn't
pin things down much. 

So my question is: (1) can anyone else reproduce the
problem?, and (2) if so, which versions of gcc, glibc, 
and what exact hardware are they using.

Details of the failure: it seems that log(9.88e-324) is
returning -infinity, instead of the correct value of 
around -743.75.  9.88e-324 is an IEEE subnormal value,
so one might expect problems given that alpha doesn't
have full hardware support for operations with subnormal
values, but my understanding is that the libm should be
fully IEEE 754 compliant, and if C code is compiled with
the -mieee flag to gcc then everything should work as
expected.  The C flags in use are:

-pthread -c -fno-strict-aliasing -mieee -g -Wall
-Wstrict-prototypes

I regret that I can't produce a minimal failing code
example, since I don't run Debian and have no direct 
access to an alpha machine.  If anyone has access to
an alpha machine and is feeling brave, they could check
out the latest Python version from svn.python.org (trunk
or py3k branch---it doesn't matter which), and verify
that after ./configure && make && make test, test_math
is failing.

Any hints about tracking down the source of this problem
would be much appreciated.

Mark