History of Berkeley TestFloat, to Release 3
John R. Hauser
2015 February 16
Releases of Berkeley TestFloat normally parallel those of Berkeley SoftFloat,
on which TestFloat is based.
Each TestFloat release necessarily incorporates all bug fixes from the
corresponding release of SoftFloat.
Release 3 (2015 February)
-
Complete rewrite, funded by the University of California, Berkeley, and
consequently having a different use license than earlier releases.
Visible changes included different names for testable functions and command
options.
-
Reinstated separate programs for generating test cases
(
testfloat_ver) and verifying test results
(testfloat_gen), as alternatives to the all-in-one
testfloat program (which remained supported).
-
Added support for testing conversions between floating-point and unsigned
integers, both 32-bit and 64-bit.
-
Added support for testing a fused multiply-add operation, for all testable
floating-point formats except 80-bit double-extended-precision.
-
Added support for testing a fifth rounding mode,
near_maxMag
(round to nearest, with ties to maximum magnitude, away from zero).
-
Added
timesoftfloat (previously found in the Berkeley SoftFloat
package).
Release 2c (2015 January)
-
Fixed mistakes affecting some 64-bit processors.
-
Made minor updates to the documentation, including improved wording for the
legal restrictions on using TestFloat releases through 2c (not
applicable to Release 3 or later).
There was never a Release 2b.
Release 2a (1998 December)
-
Added support for testing conversions between floating-point and
64-bit signed integers.
-
Improved the Makefiles.
Release 2 (1997 June)
-
Integrated the generation of test cases and the checking of system results into
a single program.
(Before they were separate programs, normally joined by explicit command-line
pipes.)
-
Improved the sequence of test cases.
-
Added support for testing 80-bit double-extended-precision and
128-bit quadruple precision.
-
Made program output more readable, and added new command arguments.
-
Reduced dependence on the quality of the standard
rand function
for generating test cases.
(Previously naively expected rand to be able to generate good
random bits for the entire machine word width.)
-
Created
testsoftfloat, with its own simpler complete software
floating-point (“slowfloat”) for comparison purposes.
-
Made some changes to the source file structure, including renaming
environment.h to milieu.h (to avoid confusion with
environment variables).
Release 1a (1996 July)
-
Added the
-tininessbefore and -tininessafter options
to control whether tininess should be detected before or after rounding.
Release 1 (1996 July)