We run Gentoo, and in our make.conf file we had CFLAGS=”-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. Well, it turns out there is a bug. If you run this script:
python -c ‘int(10.1); int(10000.3); int(1.2)’

You will get an overflow error. The fix is to use CFLAGS=”-march=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. We just ran emerge glibc, and the python script ran fine. For more info, see the thread on the Gentoo forums here. Note that this isn’t an issue with most other distributions, because they aren’t optimized for specific processors. This is mainly a Gentoo or lfs issue.