It's a useful feature as far as hand-written and generated assembly
language is concerned. The Intel SIMD instruction sets work far better
with aligned memory (e.g. you can use MOVAPS instead of MOVUPS, the
former being faster on older CPUs but triggering a segmentation fault if
the memory is unaligned). Granted, while vectorcall currently only works
on x86_64-win64 because I was able to re-use the code for the System V
ABI, with an aligned stack it might make it potentially easier to port
it to i386-win32 eventually (under Microsoft Visual C++, __vectorcall is
supported on 32-bit platforms by only using ECX and EDX as the integer
registers... the same as __fastcall... speaking of 'fastcall' I do
wonder if it's worth implementing that calling convention in case one
wants to communicate with an external library that uses the convention).
Gareth aka. Kit
On 15/09/2019 21:07, Florian Klämpfl wrote:
Am 15.09.19 um 19:35 schrieb Florian Klämpfl:
In r43005 to 43014 I committed a couple of patches so FPC generates
stack frames aligned to 16 byte boundaries on i386-linux (before a
call instruction, esp is dividable by 16). This is done because it
seems that linux library start to depend on this property gcc ensures
for around 20 years. To ensure this, FPC uses the same approach as
clang (and as FPC for i386-darwin uses): esp has a fixed value
fulfilling the alignment requirements during the whole procedure.
Outgoing parameters are copied by mov instead of push instructions
onto the stack. The consequences of these changes are:
- For pure pascal programs, this does not change anything. The
resulting code might be slightly bigger but in turn floating point
code might be faster as double values can be properly aligned now.
- Most assembler code is not affected by the change. Only code using
constants to access the stack via esp might be affected, such code is
rare.
- Assembler code calling other procedures should be adapted to keep
the stack aligned to 16 byte boundaries as well. Assembler code
working on i386-darwin fulfills this requirement already. The define
FPC_STACKALIGNMENT contains the alignment of the stack (16 in the
case of i386-linux).
- To test if the stack is always properly aligned, compile with -Ct:
the stack checking code for i386-linux checks the stack alignment now
as well.
One thing (and actually an important one) I forgot to mention: this
means also that the regcall calling conventions we use by default on
i386-linux use now a caller-cleared stack. I forgot about because even
our regression tests did not find this. OTOH it means, that probably
little code out there is affected by this, an exception might be
PascalScript.
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
