What is meant by FPU? How does it relates to kernel?
FPU (Floating Point Unit) is a special hardware accompanied with your processor (usually within) for doing floating-point arithmetic. Its infact a separate processing core with its own set of registers for doing the work. As with any other resource, concurrent access and race conditions are possible in this one also, which requires us to save the FPU state(registers) in case of any context switch. The kernel doesn't wanna have this overhead when it can mostly do without it. I hope you have got your answer. jinesh. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
