Re: [PATCH 2/2] ftrace: support for PowerPC

From: Scott Wood
Date: Thu May 15 2008 - 12:49:38 EST


On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:28:57PM -0700, David Miller wrote:
> From: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 23:49:44 -0400
>
> > +#ifdef CONFIG_FTRACE
> > +#ifdef CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE
> > +_GLOBAL(mcount)
> > +_GLOBAL(_mcount)
> > + stwu r1,-48(r1)
> > + stw r3, 12(r1)
> > + stw r4, 16(r1)
> > + stw r5, 20(r1)
> > + stw r6, 24(r1)
> > + mflr r3
> > + stw r7, 28(r1)
> > + mfcr r5
> > + stw r8, 32(r1)
> > + stw r9, 36(r1)
> > + stw r10,40(r1)
> > + stw r3, 44(r1)
> > + stw r5, 8(r1)
>
> Yikes, that's really expensive.
>
> Can't you do a tail call and let the function you end
> up calling do all the callee-saved register pops onto
> the stack?

The PPC32 ABI seems to (unfortunately) suggest that, with mcount, all
registers are callee-saved (except for the modifiable-during-function-linkage
registers like r0, r11, and r12) -- so mcount has to save the registers that
the callee won't (because they're normally volatile).

-Scott
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