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Re: Corel NetWinder as a wearable?

On Fri, 2 Oct 1998  wrote:
> The SA110 just about has to have a fp processor, as the work on non-fp ports
> is just starting, and the only hardware to successfully run Linux w/o it is
> the Palm Pilot.

You're getting confused with the memory management unit. The floating
point unit does calculations which involve a variable number of digits
after a decimal point. The memory management unit is a completely
different thing, which generates exceptions if an attempt is made to
access memory outside a set range (important to stop user apps from being
able to crash the system, and also for implementing things like swap
memory and demand paged executables).
Incidentally, the Palm Pilot is not the only hardware which linux has been
ported to without an MMU, but also the older x86 processors (Alan Cox was
heavily involved with this, I think). Without an MMU, though, Unix is
really little more than a joke (did anyone ever take Minix seriously?).
Very few of the Arm processors have an FPU because they are intended for
low power embedded applications, and FPUs consume a lot of power and are
not often used in embedded applications.

--------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. --------------
: Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham :
-------------------- http://www.linuxhacker.org/ --------------------

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