We're seeing gobs of these via dmesg in PostgreSQL 8.3.3 on ia64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-8), kernel 2.6.9-55.EL: postmaster(13144): floating-point assist fault at ip 40000000003a9382, isr 0000040000000008 It appears to be an Itanium-specific issue with floating-point normalization, here is a document describing the issue. http://i-cluster2.inrialpes.fr/doc/misc/fpswa.txt “The Intel Itanium does not fully support IEEE denormals and requires software assistance to handle them. Without further informations, the ia64 GNU/Linux kernel triggers a fault when denormals are computed. This is the "floating-point software assist" fault (FPSWA) in the kernel messages. It is the user's task to clearly design his program to prevent such cases.” “To conclude, I'd like to stress the fact that the programmer has to be careful when dealing with floating-point numbers. Even with high precision, it is easy to produce denormals and get strange behaviour.” Any thoughts? TIA. Ed
