Author: Thomas PorninThomas Pornin Date: Sep 22, 2008 05:52
According to Charles Davis gamewood.net>:
> I seem to remember, the 80387 chip is the 'Floating Point' chip that
> goes with the 80386 family CPU? If 387 support is being loaded, then
> 387 operations will fail if that chip isn't physically there.
Not with Linux. Using FPU opcodes when the FPU is not physically present
triggers exceptions, but the OS traps them and emulates them.
Computations will be slow, but should not fail.
Besides, it takes some effort to find an i386-compatible platform which
runs Linux but does not feature a FPU (either you dig out a 15-year old
486SX PC, or you go for an embedded system with a low-end Intel clone
such as the Vortex86SX).
--Thomas Pornin
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