From: Scott Telford (s.telford@ed.ac.uk)
Date: 05/28/93


From: s.telford@ed.ac.uk (Scott Telford)
Subject: Re: No sock_ioctl.h with Alpha-pl10??
Date: 28 May 1993 12:08:57 GMT

In article <1u3s5j$qvg@uniwa.uwa.edu.au>, janice@tartarus.uwa.edu.au
(Chong) writes:

> * You have a bad 386/387 coupling.^MMath coprocessor using exception 16
> * error reporting.

> The * lines are bothering me. Firstly, what does 386/7 coupling mean??
> I've got 486DX2-50.

The way the kernel tests for an FPU is slightly odd. It first prints

"You have a bad 386/387 coupling"

then tries to get the FPU to respond (can't remember exactly what it
does), then if it gets a response it overwrites the above message with

"Math coprocessor using <method> error reporting."

(hence the ^M). If the FPU responds you won't see the first message
because it's so fast, but if it doesn't then the first message doesn't
get overwritten and you see it. I assume you copied the messages from
a syslog file? Unfortunately both messages will appear in a syslog
file, which no doubt many will find confusing 8-)

-- 
Scott Telford, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre,        <s.telford@ed.ac.uk>
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Rd, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK. (+44 31 650 5978)
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