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floating point functions returning bogus results on ARM target?


Hello,

I'm  trying  to get newlib to compute interesting stuff on an NXP
LPC2138, which is an ARM7TDMI-S  based  microcontroller.  I  have
compiled  gcc-4.3.4  and newlib-1.18.0 on an i386 Linux host, the
target is arm-elf. The compiler seems to work OK, at least I have
successfully  ported  FreeRTOS,  which works fine. Integer arith-
metic seems to be ok, too. However, floating point stuff seems to
be completely off.  I wonder whom to blame: the compiler, newlib,
or something I did not think about?

The following code tests whether x - floor(x) is smaller than  1,
which  it  should  always be by the definition of the floor func-
tion:

        double  x = 1234567./1024., z;
        while (1) {
                x += 0.1;
                z = x - floor(x);
                if (z >= 1) {
                        putchar('+');
                } else {
                        putchar('-');
                }
        }

When I run this code on a Linux system, it outputs only -  signs,
as  expected.   On the ARM target, with newlib, I get a nice pat-
tern of + and -. It starts off like this

    --++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++---++

so 2 out of 5 computations fail the test.

I did a similar test for the values of the sin(x) function, which
should never exceed 1: again 2 out of 5 numbers fail the test.

So  what  am  I missing here? Should I have built the compiler or
newlib differently? I used the  following  configure  command  to
build newlib and the compiler:

        ../newlib-1.18.0/configure --target=arm-elf --prefix=/usr/local/arm \
            --enable-interwork --enable-multilib --enable-target-optspace \
            --with-float=soft
        ../gcc-4.3.4/configure --target=arm-elf --prefix=/usr/local/arm \
            --enable-interwork --enable-multilib --enable-languages="c,c++" \
            --enable-target-optspace --with-float=soft --with-newlib \
            --with-headers=../newlib-1.18.0/newlib/libc/include/ --disable-nls

I  do  have  other problems with newlib on the ARM, e.g. that the
processor goes into an abort state as soon as I try to use printf
with a float or double (no problem with integers), but that seems
to be a well known problem having to do with  printf's  excessive
demands  on  the stack or heap (which the LPC2138 simply does not
have). This however prevents me from posting numeric results.

Mit herzlichem Gruss

                                        Andreas Müller

--
Andreas Müller
HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil
Oberseestrasse 10, Postfach 1475, CH-8640 Rapperswil
Tel: 41 55 222 41 11   Email: andreas.mueller@hsr.ch



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