glibc/ports
Maciej W. Rozycki 9c21573c02 MIPS: IEEE 754-2008 NaN encoding support
It has been a long practice for software using IEEE 754 floating-point
arithmetic run on MIPS processors to use an encoding of Not-a-Number
(NaN) data different to one used by software run on other processors.
And as of IEEE 754-2008 revision [1] this encoding does not follow one
recommended in the standard, as specified in section 6.2.1, where it
is stated that quiet NaNs should have the first bit (d1) of their
significand set to 1 while signalling NaNs should have that bit set to
0, but MIPS software interprets the two bits in the opposite manner.

As from revision 3.50 [2][3] the MIPS Architecture provides for
processors that support the IEEE 754-2008 preferred NaN encoding format.
As the two formats (further referred to as "legacy NaN" and "2008 NaN")
are incompatible to each other, tools have to provide support for the
two formats to help people avoid using incompatible binary modules.

The change is comprised of two functional groups of features, both of
which are required for correct support.

1. Dynamic linker support.

   To enforce the NaN encoding requirement in dynamic linking a new ELF
   file header flag has been defined.  This flag is set for 2008-NaN
   shared modules and executables and clear for legacy-NaN ones.  The
   dynamic linker silently ignores any incompatible modules it
   encounters in dependency processing.

   To avoid unnecessary processing of incompatible modules in the
   presence of a shared module cache, a set of new cache flags has been
   defined to mark 2008-NaN modules for the three ABIs supported.
   Changes to sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/mips/readelflib.c have been made
   following an earlier code quality suggestion made here:

   http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-ports/2009-03/msg00036.html

   and are therefore a little bit more extensive than the minimum
   required.

   Finally a new name has been defined for the dynamic linker so that
   2008-NaN and legacy-NaN binaries can coexist on a single system that
   supports dual-mode operation and that a legacy dynamic linker that
   does not support verifying the 2008-NaN ELF file header flag is not
   chosen to interpret a 2008-NaN binary by accident.

2. Floating environment support.

   IEEE 754-2008 features are controlled in the Floating-Point Control
   and Status (FCSR) register and updates are needed to floating
   environment support so that the 2008-NaN flag is set correctly and
   the kernel default, inferred from the 2008-NaN ELF file header flag
   at the time an executable is loaded, respected.

As the NaN encoding format is a property of GCC code generation that is
both a user-selected GCC configuration default and can be overridden
with GCC options, code that needs to know what NaN encoding standard it
has been configured for checks for the __mips_nan2008 macro that is
defined internally by GCC whenever the 2008-NaN mode has been selected.
This mode is determined at the glibc configuration time and therefore a
few consistency checks have been added to catch cases where compilation
flags have been overridden by the user.

The 2008 NaN set of features relies on kernel support as the in-kernel
floating-point emulator needs to be aware of the NaN encoding used even
on hard-float processors and configure the FPU context according to the
value of the 2008 NaN ELF file header flag of the executable being
started.  As at this time work on kernel support is still in progress
and the relevant changes have not made their way yet to linux.org master
repository.

Therefore the minimum version supported has been artificially set to
10.0.0 so that 2008-NaN code is not accidentally run on a Linux kernel
that does not suppport it.  It is anticipated that the version is
adjusted later on to the actual initial linux.org kernel version to
support this feature.  Legacy NaN encoding support is unaffected, older
kernel versions remain supported.

[1] "IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic", IEEE Computer
    Society, IEEE Std 754-2008, 29 August 2008

[2] "MIPS Architecture For Programmers, Volume I-A: Introduction to the
    MIPS32 Architecture", MIPS Technologies, Inc., Document Number:
    MD00082, Revision 3.50, September 20, 2012

[3] "MIPS Architecture For Programmers, Volume I-A: Introduction to the
    MIPS64 Architecture", MIPS Technologies, Inc., Document Number:
    MD00083, Revision 3.50, September 20, 2012
2013-09-18 21:33:50 +01:00
..
sysdeps MIPS: IEEE 754-2008 NaN encoding support 2013-09-18 21:33:50 +01:00
ChangeLog hppa: add fanotify_mark 2013-09-02 23:22:24 -04:00
ChangeLog.aarch64 [AArch64] Provide symbol version for _mcount. 2013-07-26 08:29:17 +01:00
ChangeLog.aix
ChangeLog.alpha Add O_TMPFILE to <fcntl.h> 2013-09-11 11:52:46 +02:00
ChangeLog.am33 Fix typos. 2013-08-29 09:11:45 +02:00
ChangeLog.arm ARM: Improve armv7 memcpy performance. 2013-09-16 17:55:28 +01:00
ChangeLog.cris
ChangeLog.hppa Add O_TMPFILE to <fcntl.h> 2013-09-11 11:52:46 +02:00
ChangeLog.ia64 Fix typos. 2013-08-30 18:08:59 +02:00
ChangeLog.linux-generic Remove trailing whitespace in ports. 2013-06-05 20:26:40 +00:00
ChangeLog.m68k Define MMAP2_PAGE_SHIFT to -1 for m68k. 2013-09-04 20:50:20 +00:00
ChangeLog.microblaze New API to set default thread attributes 2013-06-15 12:24:15 +05:30
ChangeLog.mips MIPS: IEEE 754-2008 NaN encoding support 2013-09-18 21:33:50 +01:00
ChangeLog.powerpc Fix typos. 2013-08-30 18:08:59 +02:00
ChangeLog.tile Fix typos. 2013-08-21 19:48:48 +02:00
README Update miscellaneous copyright dates. 2013-01-02 19:43:40 +00:00

This is the glibc ports add-on, an add-on for the GNU C Library (glibc).
It contains code that is not maintained in the official glibc source tree.

This includes working ports to GNU/Linux on some machine architectures that
are not maintained in the official glibc source tree.  It also includes
some code once used by old libc ports now defunct, which has been abandoned
but may be useful for some future porter to examine.  It may also include
some optimized functions tailored for specific CPU implementations of an
architecture, to be selected using --with-cpu.

The ports add-on is cooperatively maintained by volunteers on the
<libc-ports@sourceware.org> mailing list, and housed in the ports
subdirectory of the glibc git repository.  See
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/download.html for details on using
git.  To report a bug in code housed in the ports add-on, please go to
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/ and file a bug report under the glibc
"ports" component.

An add-on for an individual port can be made from just the sysdeps/
subdirectories containing the port's code.  You may want to include a
README and Banner of your own talking about your port's code in particular,
rather than the generic ones here.

The real source code for any ports is found in the sysdeps/ subdirectories.
These should be exactly what would go into the main libc source tree if you
were to incorporate it directly.  The only exceptions are the files
sysdeps/*/preconfigure and sysdeps/*/preconfigure.in; these are fragments
used by this add-on's configure fragment.  The purpose of these is to set
$base_machine et al when the main libc configure's defaults are not right
for some machine.  Everything else can and should be done from a normal
sysdeps/.../configure fragment that is used only when the configuration
selects that sysdeps subdirectory.  Each port that requires some special
treatment before the sysdeps directory list is calculated, should add a
sysdeps/CPU/preconfigure file; this can either be written by hand or
generated by Autoconf from sysdeps/CPU/preconfigure.in, and follow the
rules for glibc add-on configure fragments.  No preconfigure file should do
anything on an unrelated configuration, so that disparate ports can be put
into a single add-on without interfering with each other.

Like all glibc add-ons, this must be used by specifying the directory in
the --enable-add-ons option when running glibc's configure script.

The GNU C Library is free software.  See the file COPYING.LIB in the
libc repository for copying conditions, and LICENSES for notices about
a few contributions that require these additional notices to be
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