The log message for 1.5 said that some small (one or two ulp) inaccuracies
were fixed, and a comment implied that the critical change is to switch
the rounding mode to to-nearest, with a switch of the precision to
extended at no extra cost. Actually, the errors are very large (ucbtest
finds ones of several hundred ulps), and it is the switch of the
precision that is critical.
Another comment was wrong about NaNs being handled sloppily.
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
-- Begin comments from J.T. Conklin:
The most significant improvement is the addition of "float" versions
of the math functions that take float arguments, return floats, and do
all operations in floating point. This doesn't help (performance)
much on the i386, but they are still nice to have.
The float versions were orginally done by Cygnus' Ian Taylor when
fdlibm was integrated into the libm we support for embedded systems.
I gave Ian a copy of my libm as a starting point since I had already
fixed a lot of bugs & problems in Sun's original code. After he was
done, I cleaned it up a bit and integrated the changes back into my
libm.
-- End comments
Reviewed by: jkh
Submitted by: jtc
