[R] What does this warning mean: "DLL attempted to change FPU control word from 8001f to 9001f"

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 14/05/2010 5:00 PM, Ted Byers wrote:
> I started a brand new session in R 2.10.1 (on Windows).
> If it matters, I am running the community edition of MySQL 5.0.67, and it is
> all running fine.
>
> I am just beginning to examine the process of getting timer series data from
> one table in MySQL, computing moving averages and computing a selection of
> estimates based on relations among moving averages of different variates,
> and storing all the results in another table in MySQL.
>
> The very first thing I did in this session was execute the following two
> commands:
>
> Sys.setenv(MYSQL_HOME='c:/MySQL')
> library(RMySQL)
>
> The output I got was:
>
> Loading required package: DBI
> Warning message:
> In inDL(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now), ...) :
>   DLL attempted to change FPU control word from 8001f to 9001f
>
> Now, I write programs in relatively high level languages (C++, perl, Java,
> and now R), and NEVER even consider twiddling with FPU control words or
> playing with registers on the processor.  I have never gotten this close to
> the hardware since I messed with video memory in the old days when I wrote
> computer based teaching materials on DOS and had to get acceptable
> performance out of the hardware available way back then..  Consequently, I
> have no idea what this warning means or what I ought to do about it.  I
> assume the DLL it is referring to is
> libmySQL.dll<http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/classes/s133/libmySQL.dll>,
> which RMySQL needs.  But I have no idea either why it would do what R says
> it is doing or why it matters to me, or what I ought to do about it.
>
> I'd appreciate any info you can provide.


That message means that the RMySQL libraries are trying to mess with the 
precision of the computations in the rest of your session.    It might 
be safe; R fixes the first attempt.  But if the libraries try again, R 
won't fix them, and the rest of your computations will be less accurate 
than they should be.  It's probably not safe to ignore the warning.   
(This might be unintentional; many Microsoft libraries do this.  But it 
is unsafe to use them.)

The safe advice is to recompile the relevant libraries in an environment 
that doesn't mess with things that don't belong to it.  If this is 
impractical, another safe alternative is to just stop using that 
package.  If this is also impractical, then you should expect your 
computations in R to be less accurate than they should be, and you 
should complain to the supplier of the badly written library that causes 
the problems.

Duncan Murdoch