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

[S Ellison]

There's a note on this issue at
http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/RunderWindows.asp 

which claims it can 'safely be ignored'. 

Your mileage may vary, I presume. 

I had the same error message under a previous version (but with a
different library and during installation, not loading, some packages)
and never observed a visible problem. However, I'd be more than willing
to accept that one would not notice changes to FPU precision for many
applications; core R authors seem to have chosen algorithms that are not
badly affected by limited precision. That doesn't mean it would have no
effect for any application, though.

S


>>> Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> 14/05/2010 22:55 >>>
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

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