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Date:   Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:54:39 -0800 (PST)
Subject:     Re: [PATCH] riscv: avoid enabling vectorized code generation
In-Reply-To: <39636675da60fc6c54cc8bbab64ddbac@codethink.co.uk>
CC:     abdulras@google.com, Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@sifive.com>,
        aou@eecs.berkeley.edu, linux-riscv@lists.infradead.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
From:   Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@dabbelt.com>
To:     ben.dooks@codethink.co.uk, ndesaulniers@google.com,
        nathan@kernel.org
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On Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:45:21 PST (-0800), ben.dooks@codethink.co.uk wrote:
>
>
> On 2022-12-16 18:50, Saleem Abdulrasool wrote:
>> The compiler is free to generate vectorized operations for zero'ing
>> memory.  The kernel does not use the vector unit on RISCV, similar to
>> architectures such as x86 where we use `-mno-mmx` et al to prevent the
>> implicit vectorization.  Perform a similar check for
>> `-mno-implicit-float` to avoid this on RISC-V targets.
>
> I'm not sure if we should be emitting either of the vector or floating
> point instrucitons in the kernel without explicitly marking the section
> of code which is using them such as specific accelerator blocks.

Yep, we can't let the compiler just blindly enable V or F/D.  V would 
very much break things as we have no support, but even when that's in 
we'll we at roughly the same spot as F/D are now where we need to handle 
the lazy save/restore bits.

This looks like an LLVM-only option, I see at least some handling here

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/a72883b7612f5c00b592da85ed2f1fd81258cc08/clang/lib/Driver/ToolChains/Clang.cpp#L2098

but I don't really know LLVM enough to understand if there's some 
default for `-mimplicit-float` and I can't find anything in the docs.  
If it can be turned on by default and that results in F/D/V instructions 
then we'll need to explicitly turn it off, and that would need to be 
backported.

Maybe Nick or Nathan knows what's up here?