Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 15:30:36 -0500 (EST) From: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Subject: Re: IDT processors? Message-ID: <199711092030.PAA08445@lakes.dignus.com>
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> As Alfred Perlstein wrote: > > > sorry for the rant, anyone know where can get a bug free chip? someone > > has to be making them... :) > > You're overly optimistic. CPU bugs aren't anything new, and Intel > doesn't have a copyright on them either. :-) > > When i started doing Unix, this was with Data General's DG/UX, > somewhere in 1991. After some time, i was trying to debug a program > that constantly behaved differently under the debugger than straight- > through. With quite a lot of effort, i had to find that the Motorola > MC88000 CPU simply botched some flags when doing hardware (instruc- > tion-level) tracing. The result of some comparision has been marked > `less than', `equal', and `greater then' at the same time. :-O > > Motorola has fixed the bug in later revisions of their CPU. > > Data General had even a builtin ``silicon filter'' in their compiler, > to work around CPU bugs. Maybe Thomas Rivers can tell us more about > it... i know he's been one of the principal gcc hackers with DG back > in those days. > > -- > cheers, J"org > Well - unfortunately I can't shed any light on that. I was part of a team doing 88k stuff separate from GCC. We were tasked with helping LPI (now Liant) getting their PL/1, COBOL, FORTRAN, etc... compilers running on the 88k. The gcc stuff was done in a separate group. I do know they did excellent work, though, thanks to the diligent efforts of a guy named Tom Wood. I understand some of the more modern GCC improvements came from his efforts. Also, I left DG in Dec. '89; which is, unfortunately, before the time we're talking about... (I believe the first 'round of AViiONs had shipped, but nothing more before I left.) - Dave Rivers -
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