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Date:      Wed, 5 Jan 2011 10:02:51 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
Cc:        Gleb Kurtsou <gleb.kurtsou@gmail.com>, src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, Dimitry Andric <dim@freebsd.org>, svn-src-head@freebsd.org, Alexander Best <arundel@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r216977 - in head/libexec/rtld-elf: amd64 i386
Message-ID:  <201101051002.51598.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <4D248540.3030602@freebsd.org>
References:  <201101042051.p04KpSGk054564@svn.freebsd.org> <201101050928.30748.jhb@freebsd.org> <4D248540.3030602@freebsd.org>

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On Wednesday, January 05, 2011 9:50:40 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> On 01/05/11 08:28, John Baldwin wrote:
> > On Wednesday, January 05, 2011 8:36:06 am Dimitry Andric wrote:
> >> On 2011-01-05 13:59, John Baldwin wrote:
> >>>> Why not to add NO_HWFLOAT knob (or similar) into makefile
> >>>> infrastructure. And set CFLAGS accordingly, depending on CC, arch, etc.
> >>>> These flags are getting rather common in tree.
> >>> It strikes me that we really want clang/gcc to have some sort of
> >>> '-mno-hwfloat' so we don't keep having to add new flags in the future.
> >> This is not just about floats, clang can also use SSE/AVX instructions
> >> for e.g.  memset(), memcpy() and the like, or even for structure
> >> assignments.
> > Yes, but the thing that all these extensions have in common is that they use
> > FPU state (i.e. subject to DNA traps, managed via *SAVE and *RSTOR, etc.)
> > and that is the problem with using them in boot code or rtld.  What I would
> > want a -mno-hwfloat flag to do is to disable use of anything that would
> > require working FPU state handling.
> 
> You would also want this to be cross-platform, in which case it's more 
> than floating point. E.g. on powerpc, you also want to disable both FP 
> and vector extensions, which use separate sets of instructions and 
> registers. I guess overriding CPU type to be something very old (386?) 
> potentially deoptimizes the code?

Hmm, I don't know if this is generically MI, but at least for x86 having a
single -mno-sse-xmm-mmx-anything-registers-please would be useful I think.

-- 
John Baldwin



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