Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] tcg: Remove stack protection from helper functions

[Peter Maydell]

On 27 September 2011 05:29, Andi Kleen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:
>> The answer is that the edge cases basically never match. No CPU
>> architecture does handling of NaNs and input denormals and output
>> denormals and underflow checks and all the rest of it in exactly
>> the same way as anybody else. (In particular x86 is pretty crazy,
>
> Can you clarify this?
>
> IEEE754 is pretty strict on how all these things are handled
> and to my knowledge all serious x86 are fully IEEE compliant.
> Or are you refering to the x87 80bits expansion? While useful
> that's not used anymore with SSE.

IEEE leaves some leeway for implementations. Just off the top
of my head:
 * if two NaNs are passed to an op then which one is propagated
   is implementation defined
 * value of the 'default NaN' is imp-def
 * whether the msbit of the significand is 1 or 0 to indicate
   an SNaN is imp-def
 * how an SNaN is converted to a QNaN is imp-def
 * tininess can be detected either before or after rounding

which different architectures vary on (and some are better at
documenting their choices than others).

Also implementations often have extra non-IEEE modes (which
may even be the default, for speed):
 * squashing denormal outputs to zero
 * squashing denormal inputs to zero
and there's even less agreement here.

Common-but-not-officially-ieee ops like 'max' and 'min'
can also vary: for instance Intel's SSE MAXSD/MINSD etc
have very weird behaviour for the special cases: if both
operands are 0.0s of any sign you always get the second
operand, so max(-0,+0) != max(+0,-0), and if only one operand
is a NaN then the second operand is returned whether it is
the NaN or not (so max(NaN, 3) != max(3, NaN).

> On the other hand qemu is not very good at it, e.g. with x87
> it doesn't even pass paranoia.

This is only because nobody cares much about x86 TCG. ARM floating
point emulation is (now) bit-for-bit correct apart from a handful
of operations which don't set the right set of exception flags.

-- PMM