Hi all,
I just ran speed tests on a Compaq XP1000 (CPU 21264)
that has been lent to me (I will buy one if it suits me).
I installed beforehand Redhat 6.0, which I downloaded from
a redhat mirror. 2 problems arose:
1) The math library seems *very* slow:
compared with a Pentium II 350 Mhz / Redhat 6.0, the Compaq station is:
- 2.5x faster for floating point operations (+ - * /)
- but 1.5x slower for math operations (sin cos log exp ...)
So I downloaded the glibc sources from GNU and compiled with different
options (I added '-O2 -mcpu=21264', and removed -mieee), but the speed
increase was only 7%.
Why the math library seems so slow ? Can it be faster ?
2) I tried to run a very large program, but I failed: it crashes with
this error message:
Floating point exception (core dumped)
I get the same errors on Intel, but the program doesn't stop,
and that suits me very well.
So I tried to catch the exception with the signal function
(signal(SIGFPE, handler)): the handler function is actually
called, but that doesn't prevent the program from crashing with
the same message.
Is there a way to prevent the crash (and if possible, without
reducing the program speed) ?
Thanks in advance
Jacques Bouchard
