Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 01/12] TCG "sync" op

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:56:47AM +0000, Paul Brook wrote:
> On Thursday 22 October 2009, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 03:52:22PM +0200, Ulrich Hecht wrote:
> > > sync allows concurrent accesses to locations in memory through different
> > > TCG variables. This comes in handy when you are emulating CPU registers
> > > that can be used as either 32 or 64 bit, as TCG doesn't know anything
> > > about aliases. See the s390x target for an example.
> > >
> > > Fixed sync_i64 build failure on 32-bit targets.
> > 
> > Looking more in details to the use case of this patch, I think it can be
> > useful in QEMU. However I don't feel very comfortable in merging it
> > without having the opinion of more persons. Paul, Malc Blue Swirl or
> > others, any opinion?
> 
> I don't think this is the right solution.
> 
> IIUC the basic problem is that we have a register file where adjacent pairs 
> of 
> 32-bit registers are also accessed as a 64-bit value.  This is something many 
> other targets need to do (at least ARM, PPC, MIPS and SPARC).
> 
> While sync appears attractive as a quick hack to achieve this, I think it is 
> liable to be abused, and cause us serious pain long-term. If you need an easy 
> solution then use ld/st (as with ARM VFP registers). If you want a good 
> solution then fix whichever bit of TCG makes accessing a pair of registers 
> horribly slow. We already have some support for this (concat_i32_i64).
> 

What is probably needed here are merge_low and merge_high ops, merging a
32-bit value into the low or high part of a 64-bit value, leaving the
other part unchanged. Not sure we can really optimize that on x86/x86_64
compared to standard TCG code though.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
address@hidden                 http://www.aurel32.net