Re: [RFC,v2] x86_64: save_args out of line

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Tue Nov 18 2008 - 18:36:41 EST


Andi Kleen wrote:
I don't think auto-generation is very a useful angle to take for this any
time soon. Explicit (but simple) macros in the assembly is what I favor.

Do you mean macros that generate both the instruction and the CFI
or separate? The major disadvantage of doing it together in a single macro is that it is not really readable for any assembler programmer anymore, but starts becoming a Linux specific assembler language. Likely not a good thing for maintenance. anyone who
wants to know the real assembler would need to read objdump -S
output, which is not nice.

Perhaps it would be a reasonable readability improvement to just use shorter cfi macros which are not shouted?

Not really. At the moment we have two parallel assembly languages which say different things about the same instructions. In practice, almost nobody understands the cfi parts, so they just get ignored while the x86 instructions change around them, leaving them either stale or missing.

If we had a sensible macro layer which emits both instructions and cfi annotations, it at least means that people who write plain x86 instructions will simply get no annotations, and people who bother to learn the (clearly and fully documented) macros will get the best of both.

J
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/