Math Coprocessors

[Lyle Seaman]

gordon at sneaky.UUCP (Gordon Burditt) writes:

>How, then, is it arranged that process A and process B, both of which use
>floating point, don't stomp all over each other's FPU registers?  It would
>seem that the kernel must minimally load and unload the FPU state when
>necessary due to process switches between processes using the FPU.

It's probably because the kernel is non-preemptable, so the FP operation
runs to completion before the process switch.

>If it doesn't use any floating-point instructions, how does it figure out
>whether the FPU is present?

Does it matter?

-- 
Lyle                      Wang             lws at comm.wang.com
508 967 2322         Lowell, MA, USA       uunet!comm.wang.com!lws
             The scum always rises to the top.