linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] ARM: makefile: pass -march=armv4 to assembler even on CPU32v3

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Date:   Mon, 1 Oct 2018 20:10:26 +0200
From:   Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>
To:     Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@...linux.org.uk>
Cc:     "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@...c4.com>,
        linux-arm-kernel <linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        arm@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] ARM: makefile: pass -march=armv4 to assembler even on CPU32v3

On 1 October 2018 at 19:56, Russell King - ARM Linux
<linux@...linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 04:49:04AM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
>> Per the discussion about half-way down in [1], the kernel doesn't
>> actually support the ARMv3 ISA, but selects it for some ARMv4 ISA
>> hardware that benefits from ARMv3 code generation.
>
> The issue is to do with the half-word stores in the ARMv4 ISA, which
> need to be avoided on StrongARM RiscPC - the bus from the processor
> card (which was designed for ARM610 and ARM710) does not support
> anything except 8-bit and 32-bit accesses, so the 16-bit load/store
> instructions don't work correctly.
>
> Obviously, the reason for having the compiler use ARMv3 is to avoid
> those instructions which we have no other way to prevent - however,
> the use of ARMv3 with the assembler ensures that ldrh/strh are not
> accidentally used.
>
> We could argue that the ARMv3 assembly files are now stable, so the
> chances of ldrh/strh being introduced is low, which would make this
> change tolerable, but the commit message needs to spell out that
> we lose this protection.
>
>> Such a consideration,
>> then, only applies to the compiler but not to the assembler. This commit
>> passes -march=armv4 to the assembler in those cases, so that code
>> written for ARMv4 will continue to compile and run fine, without needing
>> module-specific asflags-y overrides.
>
> Note that "code written for ARMv4" will not be usable on this platform
> if it makes use of ldrh/strh, so depending on which instructions the
> assembler is complaining about, it could very well be a real "you're
> doing something wrong" case.
>
> The side effect of this patch is that such cases will now be hidden
> rather than evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
>

Thanks for the insight.

So Arnd's suggestion to switch to armv3-m would actually be feasible
then? The code in question does not use ldrh only umull, and so it
should build with armv3m as well. And we will even generate some
better code for RiscPC if we apply it to both the cflags and the
asflags.