Comment by Dylan16807

> You are not supposed to use FP/SSE in kernel mode.

> It was always frowned upon

Whether it's frowned upon is a completely different issue from whether it intertwines your data so deeply with the kernel that it makes your code a derivative work subject to the GPL license. Which it doesn't.

> if the question was "can I just use FP in the kernel" then the answer is still a resounding NO, since other architectures may not support it AT ALL.

It's not actually using floating point, it's using faster instructions for integer math, and it has a perfectly viable fallback for architectures that don't have those instructions. But why use the slower version when there's no real reason to?

> and these specific functions, that were marked as GPL were already deprecated for well over a decade.

But the GPL export is still there, isn't it? It's not that functionality is being removed, it's that functionality is being shifted to only have a GPL export with no license-based justification for doing so.