x86 fpu

[Kevin_Hendricks]

Hi,

Just to add my 2 cents to the fire.

I think that what H.J. Lu does for gdb and Linux definitely has added value in 
the past especially for PowerPC.  

For example, before Kevin Buettner officially joined gdb, the powerpc camp was 
out on its own. Many months ago (a year?) we tried to get gdb to support PPC in 
gdb 4.17 by contributing a patch which was rejected since its author (Kevin 
Buettner) had not recently signed a copyright assignment (although he had in the 
past).  We requested the proper forms but nothing ever came from it.

Meanwhile H.J. Lu's gdb included ppc support and even includes linuxthreads 
support (which finally made it possible for me to debug native_threads JDK's as 
part of the Blackdown effort). If I had waited for "official" support, all 
development would have ground to a halt long ago.

Basically, H.J. Lu's tools have simply been a big help.   
His tools have filled a need that the GDB effort should have been filling.  If 
they had, there would have been no need for a splinter in the first place (as I 
think Stan pointed out).

Right now, gdb on PowerPC is still not completely stable debugging 
shared-libraries (missing symbols, multiple functions mapping to the same 
address, etc), but what H.J. Lu has is much better than what we are seeing 
officially.

I will use which ever set of tools fixes that problem, splinter or not.
The GDB project has the methods to "fix this splinter issue itself"... eliminate 
the need, and the splinter's will go away.

Kevin

--
Kevin B. Hendricks
Associate Professor of Operations and Information Technology
Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario  N6A-3K7  CANADA   
khendricks@ivey.uwo.ca, (519) 661-3874, fax: 519-661-3959