Funny enough, I've been compiling a lot of stuff for 386 Linux lately. You can build a kernel with built in software floating point, at which point it doesn't matter what your library/compiler do. If your kernel isn't built to handle that, you can build glibc with floating point emulation.
replyAt least this is my impression, working with 2.2.x/2.4.x kernels, gcc 2.7~3.3, and glibc ~2.2
Yap. But as hinted by the comments before you, if you have CPUs without FPUs, you probably want to enable userspace (e.g. glibc) soft math support anyway, since it doesn’t have the overhead of trapping the instructions and context switching into the kernel and back.
replyThe benefit of OP’s solution in the kernel is that it works for everything out of the box, including pre-compiled binaries, and those that you can’t rebuild for whatever reason to begin with.