Gcc certification

[Robert Dewar]

Joe Buck wrote:

> You can't skip validating the tables.

One would think that should be the case, but you are arguing what
should be, not what is (referencing the Do178B standard :-) One
big loop hole is that you can move stuff into the hardware, and
hardware does not have the same rigourous certification standards
as software.
> 
> The famous Pentium bug, which reportedly cost Intel 470 million dollars,
> was due to an incorrectly generated table (the table was originally
> correct, but the script to embed the table into a programmable logic array
> had a bug).  Five positions in a lookup table used by the microcode for
> the division instruction had the wrong value.

And most certainly applications could be certified on that flawed
Pentium :-)