FP PROBLEM RESOLUTION

[Mike Pellatt]

In article <2432 at inco.UUCP>, mack at inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
> >From csmunix.larc.nasa.gov!whg  Mon Jul 18 22:43:11 1988 remote from uunet
> To: bill%bts.uucp
> Subject: More on Erratum 21
> 
> Bill,
> 
>      Erratum 21 is an occasionally discussed bug in the 80386 that occurs
> sometimes during floating point operations when paging is also occuring.
> Intel has said that they have plans to fix this bug but I'm not sure if
> ......

	I think this one will be fixed in the 'D' stepping of the 80386
(when that finally hits the streets...)

>      Anyway, glad you resolved your problem. I struggled with it for several
> months and know how frustrating it can be. I'm very surprised with how little
> discussion there is on the net about this problem. I guess most 386 Unix
> users aren't using 387's. I posted an enquiry about a month ago soliciting
> people's experiences with both 387's and 1167's under Unix and got only

	I used to work for a company that manufactures 386-based AT baseboards
(European Tech. Mktg. for it). We got REALLY burnt on this one, not just
with Unix. The board had 512KB non-expandable on the baseboard, so to
backfill to 640KB for DOMESTOS our customers had to use software like
QEMM Or Phoenix's Control-386 to put the 386 in virtual-86 mode and usse
the paging hardware to "move" 128KB from plug-in 32-bit memory, which sat
in the address space from 1MB upwards. This blew out Autocad for one, with the
387 installed. My experience (up to Jan. this year) was that we didn't
get problems with Xenix/Unix. Basically, I think, because the majority of
customers ran DOMESTOS. Ho- hum.

	(Oh yes - for you guys the other side of the pond. DOMESTOS is the
brand name of a bleach/lavatory cleaner in the UK. Hence the pun on MSDOS)

Mike Pellatt - Xi Software Ltd.		Sorry for the brief .sign - this is a
uucp:...mcvax!ukc!uel!olgb1!mikep	newsreading acct.