Message-ID: <54347E47.1080809@caviumnetworks.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 16:59:03 -0700
From: David Daney <ddaney@caviumnetworks.com>
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To: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
CC: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>, David Daney <ddaney.cavm@gmail.com>,
        <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        <linux-mips@linux-mips.org>, David Daney <david.daney@cavium.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH resend] MIPS: Allow FPU emulator to use non-stack area.
References: <1412627010-4311-1-git-send-email-ddaney.cavm@gmail.com> <20141006205459.GZ23797@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <5433071B.4050606@caviumnetworks.com> <20141007232019.GA30470@linux-mips.org>
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On 10/07/2014 04:20 PM, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 02:18:19PM -0700, David Daney wrote:
>
>>> As an alternative, if the space of possible instruction with a delay
>>> slot is sufficiently small, all such instructions could be mapped as
>>> immutable code in a shared mapping, each at a fixed offset in the
>>> mapping. I suspect this would be borderline-impractical (multiple
>>> megabytes?), but it is the cleanest solution otherwise.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, there are 2^32 possible instructions.  Each one is 4 bytes, plus you
>> need a way to exit after the instruction has executed, which would require
>> another instruction.  So you would need 32GB of memory to hold all those
>> instructions, larger than the 32-bit virtual address space.
>
> Plus errata support for some older CPUs requires no other instructions
> that might cause an exception to be present in the same cache line inflating
> the size to 32 bytes per instruction.
>
> I've contemplated a full emulation - but that would require an emulator that
> is capable of most of the instruction set.  With all the random ASEs around
> that would be hard to implement while the FPU emulator trampoline as currently
> used has the advantage of automatically supporting ASEs, known and unknown.
> So it's a huge bonus for maintenance.
>

Unfortunatly it breaks when our friends at Imgtec introduce their PC 
relative instructions in mipsr6, so an emulator may be unavoidable.

David Daney


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