linux-kernel - Re: [patch 5/8] Immediate Values

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Date:	Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:34:09 -0500
From:	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
To:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
Cc:	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Andi Kleen <ak@....de>, Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@...hat.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 5/8] Immediate Values - x86 Optimization (update)

* H. Peter Anvin (hpa@...or.com) wrote:
> Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>> Andi seemed to trust gas stability and you answered:
>> "The comment was referring to x86-64, but I incorrectly remembered that 
>> applying to "movq $imm,%reg" as opposed to loading from an absolute 
>> address.  gas actually has a special opcode (movabs) for the 64-bit 
>> version of the latter variant, which is only available with %rax and its 
>> subregisters.
>> Nevermind, in other words.  It's still true, though, that the immediate 
>> will always be the last thing in the instruction -- that's a fixture of 
>> the instruction format."
>> So, in the end, is there a way to make x86_64 use a fixed-size opcode
>> for the 1, 2, 4 and 8 bytes load immediates or we will have to force the
>> use of a specific register ?
>> (and we can't take a pointer from the end of the instruction, because we
>> need to align the immediate value correctly)
>
> For a 64-bit load, you'll always have a REX prefix.  For 8-, 16- and 32-bit 
> load, the length of the instruction will depend on the register chosen, 
> unless you constrain to either all legacy or all upper registers, or you 
> force gas to generate a prefix, but I don't think there is a way to do that 
> that will work with assemblers all the way back to 2.12, which is at least 
> what we officially support (I have no idea if assemblers that far back 
> actually *work*, mind you.)
>
> 	-hpa

Ok, so the most flexible solution that I see, that should fit for both
i386 and x86_64 would be :


1 byte  : "=Q" : Any register accessible as rh: a, b, c, and d.
2, 4 bytes : "=R" : Legacy register—the eight integer registers available
                 on all i386 processors (a, b, c, d, si, di, bp, sp). 
8 bytes : (only for x86_64)
          "=r" : A register operand is allowed provided that it is in a
                 general register.

That should make sure x86_64 won't try to use REX prefixed opcodes for
1, 2 and 4 bytes values.

Does it make sense ?

Mathieu


-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Ph.D. Student, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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