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Subject: Floating point exceptions on i386 and FreeBSD-2.2.X
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Dear FreeBSD community!

I have used FreeBSD for three years in desktop publishing
and I was always very satisfied with stability and performance
of the well-organized FreeBSD system.
But now I am disappointed because of difficulties coming up
in numerical and mathematical computations.

As a mathematician I had thought,
that math should be one of the smaller problems for a computer ...

But there occur so much serious floating point exceptions and
strange underflows! Can I trust any longer the libm of FreeBSD?
Most of my programs written in C use the Mesa library.
They run very well on other architectures like Alpha machines with DEC Unix,
Silicons with Irix and also i386 machines with Linux.
Using the same compiler gcc-2.7.2.1 under FreeBSD-2.2.X I had
always to compile libm, Mesa-2.6 libraries and my own programs
without any optimization flags to get partially executable code!

It is a pity but sticking to Linux seems to be the only way
for me to get reliable numerical results.

So long,
Jens Griepentrog

griepent@wias-berlin.de

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