https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/math-e...
One of the most surprising things about floating-point is that very little is actually IEEE 754; most things are merely IEEE 754-ish, and there's a long tail of fiddly things that are different that make it only -ish.
It'll be interesting if the "-ish" bits are still "-ish" with the current standard.
> Implementations should support the extended format corresponding to the widest basic format supported.
_if_ it exists, it is required to have at least as many bits as the x87 long double type.¹
The language around extended formats changed in the 2008 standard, but the meaning didn't:
> Language standards or implementations should support an extended precision format that extends the widest basic format that is supported in that radix.
That language is still present in the 2019 standard. So nothing has ever really changed here. Double-extended is recommended, but not required. If it exists, the significand and exponent must be at least as large as those of the Intel 80-bit format, but they may also be larger.
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¹ At the beginning of the standardization process, Kahan and Intel engineers still hoped that the x87 format would gradually expand in subsequent CPU generations until it became what is now the standard 128b quad format; they didn't understand the inertia of binary compatibility yet. So the text only set out minimum precision and exponent range. By the time the standard was published in 1985, it was understood internally that they would never change the type, but by then other companies had introduced different extended-precision types (e.g. the 96-bit type in Apple's SANE), so it was never pinned down.
Intel 80387 was made compliant with the final standard and by that time there were competing FPUs also compliant with the final standard, e.g. Motorola 68881.