The mantissa of mp_no is intended to take only integral values. This
is a relatively good choice for powerpc due to its 4 fpus, but not for
other architectures, which suffer due to this choice. This change
makes the default mantissa a long integer and allows powerpc to
override it. Additionally, some operations have been optimized for
integer manipulation, resulting in a significant improvement in
performance.
Siddhesh Poyarekar