[MertsA]

>A seasoned kernel developer

I think you should take another look at the author list. Chris Mason counts as a seasoned kernel developer in my book. Either way I think you're missing the point. Yes gcj would be different, but there's a decent chance it could hand you a binary that reproduces the issue that you can bisect to the root cause from there. It's one thing to run it through gcj and see if it reproduces, rewriting it in C is a ton of work compared to gcj for something that might not pan out.

[SomeoneFromCA]

I am not missing the point, as I do not believe in authorities and someone else's evaluations of skill level of yet another person. To rewrite a simple exponentiation in C would not cause "lots of work", and pinpointing the culprit, the exponentiation does not require any gdb debugging and disassembling. In fact, just knowing that exponentiation has caused that suggests faulty hardware and not further investigation required.

You should probably invite these people themselves to the discussion instead of speaking on their behalf. Not productive.