Re: first packages for mipsel
On Sat, 7 Apr 2001, Kevin D. Kissell wrote:
> > It was discussed a few times already. It's ugly and is an overkill for
> > UP machines -- you take at least two faults for ll/sc emulation and only a
> > single syscall for TAS.
>
> Depends on your point of view. Syscalls will be faster than
> emulation on processors without LL/SC support, certainly,
> but much slower than just executing the instructions on processors
> that do support LL/SC. Intuitively, emulation would be roughly
> 2x worse for an R3K, but a syscall will be 10-100 times worse
> for an R4K. If we gave an equal weight to both families, that
> would argue in favor of LL/SC emulation - and working for
> MIPS Technologies (where all our designs for the past
> 10 years have supported LL/SC) I would consider equal
> weighting to be very generous! ;-)
You are right, of course. That's why glibc contains two versions of
_test_and_set() code. If compiled for MIPS I, glibc uses a syscall
(currently sysmips()), while for MIPS II and higher it uses inline
assembly code which makes use of LL/SC.
That's exactly the way glibc does CPU-model-specific code for other
archs.
> I've seen the hybrid proposal of having libc determine the LL/SC
> capability of the processor and either executing the instructions
> or doing the syscall as appropriate. While that would allow
> near-optimal performance on all systems, I find it troublesome,
> both on the principle that the OS should conceal hardware
> implementation details from the user, and on the practical basis
> that glibc is the last place I would want to put more CPU-specific
> cruft. But reasonable people can disagree.
I don't like run-time detection either. The compile-time choice is
sufficient enough. The _test_and_set() library function already hides
implementation details from the user.
--
+ Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+ e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +
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