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Re: thread-ready ABIs
- From: "H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>
- To: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro at ds2 dot pg dot gda dot pl>
- Cc: "Kevin D. Kissell" <kevink at mips dot com>,Machida Hiroyuki <machida at sm dot sony dot co dot jp>, drepper at redhat dot com,GNU C Library <libc-alpha at sources dot redhat dot com>, linux-mips at oss dot sgi dot com
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 10:24:55 -0800
- Subject: Re: thread-ready ABIs
- References: <003701c1a25f$8abfc120$0deca8c0@Ulysses> <Pine.GSO.3.96.1020121144413.22392C-100000@delta.ds2.pg.gda.pl>
On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 02:56:21PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
>
> > It's a common technique to bind a static register
> > to a global variable. Linking to libraries with no
> > knowledge of this variable breaks nothing, since
> > by the ABI, all use of "s" registers requires that
> > they be preserved and returned intact to the caller.
> > It seems to me to be quite straightforward to apply
> > this technique to the thread register. The *only*
> > issue I see is that of performance, and it is by
> > no means clear how severe this would be.
>
> The k0/k1 approach is a performance hit as well. Possibly a worse one,
> as you lose a few cycles unconditionally every exception, while having one
> static register less in the code can be dealt with by a compiler in a more
> flexible way.
>
> > In the compiled code that I have examined
> > for compiler efficiency in the past, it's pretty
> > rare that *all* static registers are actually used.
>
> Even with one register less there are still eight remaining, indeed.
If people believe it won't be a big problem, we can tell gcc not to use
$23, at least when compiling glibc. The question is, should $23 be
fixed outside of glibc? Ulrich, should applciations have access to
thread register directly? If not, we may add a switch to tell gcc that
$23 is fixed and compile glibc with it.
H.J.