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Re: RFC: [PATCH] X86: Add pseudo prefixes to control encoding


On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 12:50 PM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 11/11/2016 09:48 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 11/04/2016 07:24 PM, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Many x86 instructions have more than one encodings.  Assembler picks
>>>> the default one, usually the shortest one.  Although the ".s", ".d8"
>>>> and ".d32" suffixes can be used to swap register operands or specify
>>>> displacement size, they aren't very flexible.  This patch adds pseudo
>>>> prefixes, {xxx}, to control instruction encoding.  The available
>>>> pseudo prefixes are {disp8}, {disp32}, {swap}, {vex2}, {vex3} and
>>>> {evex}.  Pseudo prefixes are preferred over the ".s", ".d8" and ".d32"
>>>> suffixes, which are deprecated.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> For certain ways of writing jump tables, instruction length
>>> specifications
>>> would be quite useful.  The assembler would be free to choose any
>>> encoding,
>>> as long as it has the required instruction length.
>>>
>>> Here's a bug which  was caused by optimizing
>>>
>>>   mov 0(%esi,%ecx,4),%edx   to   mov (%esi,%ecx,4),%edx
>>
>>
>> This is done on purpose since "0" can be encoded as 0, 8 or 32-bit.
>> Now you can use {disp8}" or "{disp32}" to prefer either 8-bit or 32-bit.
>
>
> Sure, but I think the instruction length specification would still be *very*
> useful in some cases to lock things down (and document the length
> dependency).

Instruction length can a vague constraint:

   0: c4 e1 78 28 50 00     vmovaps 0x0(%rax),%xmm2
   6: 62 f1 7c 08 28 10     vmovaps (%rax),%xmm2

Both instructions with the same length do the same thing.
But one is AVX and the other is AVX512.

   c: c4 e1 78 28 10       vmovaps (%rax),%xmm2
  11: c5 f8 28 50 00       vmovaps 0x0(%rax),%xmm2

These 2 are AVX.  Majority of programmers don't care how
an instruction is encoded.  If they want specific instruction
length, they can experiment with pseudo prefixes to get
exactly what they need.

-- 
H.J.


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