Darren J Moffat wrote:
> Cynthia McGuire wrote:
>> Because use of floating point types is discouraged in the kernel, and 
>> all of
> 
> Discouraged yes but it does work and it is used in places.  Care needs 
> to be taken though.  The only place I know of that does it is the 
> sun4u/sparcv9 optimised version of the bignum module.
> 
>> the FMA components that will be consuming these new interfaces live in
>> userland, they will be made available via libnvpair but not in the 
>> kernel DDI.
>> Preprocessor guards will be used to ensure the new code is not compiled
>> into the kernel.
> 
> I don't have a current use for them but rather than just not making them 
> available wouldn't it be better to but a nice big warning in the man page ?
> 

I suppose we could do that.  However, like I said, there aren't any current 
consumers for it in the kernel so the kernel version would go untested.  Not 
sure how good that is.  If a kernel consumer comes along some time down the 
road, it's a straightforward code change to enable the kernel interface (mostly 
just a matter of removing the preprocessor guards)  At which time, they can go 
to psarc and folks here can decide if what they're doing is a good idea or not 
:)

rob

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