Re: Bug#111581: more information needed on your bug report
On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 03:11:25PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 07:22:14PM +0100, Philip Blundell wrote:
> > The kernel does have some support for emulating umul in software; see
> > arch/sparc/kernel/traps.c::do_illegal_instruction. This code seems to
> > only be enabled for sun4c and sun4, whereas the original poster
> > mentioned he is using sun4m.
>
> Thanks, Phil!
>
> SPARC folks: is there such a thing as a 4m that doesn't implement the
> umul instruction?
Seems there is. The Cypress is a v7 CPU, but with a sun4m MMU. So it's
sort of inbetween what is commonly accepted as a sun4c and a sun4m.
> > It looks like the umul in X is actually coming from a piece of
> > handwritten assembler in hw/xfree86/loader/SparcMulDiv.S. This could
> > presumably be replaced by an implementation that doesn't use umul
> > without too much trouble, but I guess the performance hit for other
> > users wouldn't be justified.
>
> Any suggestions for how run-time checking could be done?
Yes. The solution is in the HWCAP's. The kernel sets the Elf flags
properly, so the code just needs to check them. If HWCAP_SPARC_MULDIV is
set, then you can use hardware muldiv functions. Otherwise, it needs the
software version.
What I don't understand is why xfree86 is trying to handle this itself.
Glibc has these functions already, so it seems the code is a waste. This
is definitely a bug in xfree86. I'm working on a patch right now.
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