Floating point hardware/software

[William H. Greene]

    I've seen very little posted about floating point
hardware/software issues with Unix/Xenix on 386 machines.
So, I'm performing a little survey to see what people's
experiences are.

                     Eratum 21

     A few people have mentioned this well-known (?) bug in
the current crop of 386 chips which occurs when a program is paging
and doing floating point operations on the 387. The 386 math
adapter board available from Bell Tech has also been mentioned.
I'm using one of these boards in a CSS Labs 386/387 box with Microport
Unix and it seems to solve the problem. I think I have also seen that
there is another source for such an adapter but can't remember where.
What 386 systems/motherboards experience this problem ? I'm thinking
about a new machine and would like to buy one that has been designed
around this problem. What about the Compaq 386/20 ? Anyone know when
Intel will be selling chips with this bug fixed ?

                      Weitek 1167

     A lot of companies are talking about this coprocessor board. Is
there anyone out there actually using it under Unix/Xenix ? Are there
versions of Unix/Xenix that support the 1167 available now ? I know
that Microport 2.2 does not but I've heard rumors about it being 
supported in the future. I saw an announcement from SCO about 1167
support in an upcoming version of Xenix. Microway says that they are
running the 1167 with a pre-release version of ATT Unix. I've heard
rumors of overheating with the 1167 and when I look at Compaq's
mechanical design of their board with the massive heat sink at the
top, I tend to wonder more. Anyone have any experiences with this ?


     Any information on these topics (or related ones)  would be very
much appreciated. Please email it to me directly and of course I will
summarize for the net.

                          Bill Greene