hardware incompatibilities

[Norman Kohn]

In article <1990Nov13.091201.1 at acad3.fai.alaska.edu> fsdal1 at acad3.fai.alaska.edu writes:
>In article <1990Nov5.142101.1 at acad3.fai.alaska.edu>, fsdal1 at acad3.fai.alaska.edu writes:
>> Has anyone had any difficulties running the following hardware with uPort
>> sys V/AT ?
>> 
>> 80287 coprocessor
>
>I removed my 80287 chip and now I am able to compile Pcomm, it seems that
>the 287 was interfering with the compile of x_rcv.c and x_send.c modules.


It's been a long time since I ran uport V/AT, but I did at one
time run it on a board with 80386 and 80287 (that's right).
                                        ^
It ran fine... in fact, at one point it was necessary:  I don't remember
how it came to pass, but at one point unix got strange ideas about
whether a math coprocessor was installed.  The effect was errors
in code (like awk) that used real arithmetic.  There's a kernel
variable that identifies the presence of a coprocessor, and
it was getting set incorrectly at boot-up.  It's referred to
somewhere in the docs, but I don't recall its name.  You might
as an experiment try code doing real arithmetic... though I don't see
how that should be an issue in your compilation.

-- 
Norman Kohn   		| ...ddsw1!nvk
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