Re: [PATCH v2] LoongArch: Clean useless vcsr in loongarch_fpu.

From: Qi Hu
Date: Wed Jul 06 2022 - 00:00:45 EST



On 2022/7/6 10:51, Xi Ruoyao wrote:
On Wed, 2022-07-06 at 10:35 +0800, Huacai Chen wrote:

Maybe Xuerui and Ruoyao have some misunderstanding. LSX/LASX will
surely be upstream, this has nothing to do with cleanup VCSR16.
Because FP/LSX/LASX share the same control bits in FCSR now.
My guess:

Almost all behavior of vector unit is controlled by FCSR (for example,
the rounding of both FPU and vector unit should be controlled by FCSR
altogether), except one bit similar to the bit 24 of MSACSR ("flush to
zero") is in VCSR [^1]. And "flush to zero" is not really useful so it
will be removed in 3A6000, and we'll not use it for 3A5000.
Actually, flush to zero has been removed in 3A5000.

[^1]: A more bold guess: the hardware engineers could have just said
"let's wire this register called MSACSR in GS464V as FCSR16/VCSR in
LA464, maybe it will be useful and who knows?" But now in practice it's
not useful.

Am I correct?
The hardware(LA464) has removed the vcsr("has but not use" is incorrect), and here are some details:

- For all FP operations, including LSX/LASX, they are controlled by fcsr0/1/2/3.

- For LSX/LASX other operations, they are *not* controlled by any other CSR now. And fcsr16 to fcsr31 are reserved to control these operations (now they are *undefined*).

- Flush to zero(MSACSR.FS) is removed and not supported.

- If you use "movfcsr2gr" to read the fcsr16, the value is *UNDEFINED*.