On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 9:57 PM, keith bierman <keith.bierman at quantum.com> wrote: > > > I. Szczesniak: > > I will not forget this. I won't forget either that Sun does not bother > to implement the SPARC ABI correctly in hardware and instead tweaks > 3rd party software to fit their reduced ABI. > > Details? I don't recall that behavior myself. > > Pointer if it's some well known misbehavior that I've forgotten about.
All of Sun's SPARCV9 chips do not implement 128bit floating point in hardware and use a software emulation for SPARCV9 ABI conformance. Unfortunately this makes software like perl, python etc slower than software running on competing hardware platforms. Sun's 'novel solution' was to reduce the data type for float in perl to double, giving Solaris an edge over its competition. Unfortunately this 'novel solution' renders the /usr/bin/perl useless for the majority of scientific applications while Sun's support division keeps telling us that this is the fault of the scientific applications (which is a terrific excuse to tell this a Sun customer who is developing and selling such software together with Sun's high end machines). Irek
