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Re: PATCH: Fix ll/sc for mips (take 3)
On Sat, Feb 02, 2002 at 01:53:23PM -0500, Justin Carlson wrote:
>
> Actually, regardless of whether modern cpus implement it, I'd argue that
> avoiding the branch likely is a good idea for 2 reasons:
>
> 1) In the latest MIPS specs (mips32 and mips64) branch likelies have
> officially been deprecated as probable removals from the architecture in
> the not-too-distant future.
>
> 2) More importantly, most implementations don't use any sort of dynamic
> branch prediction on branch likelies. They predict taken, always, since
> that's the specified intent (it's a branch *likely* to be taken). For
> most spin locks, the normal behaviour is a fall through, not taking that
> branch, so you're inflicting a branch mispredict penalty on every lock
> grabbed without contention. Even for locks which the general case is
> contention, giving the processor branch predictor a chance to learn that
> is a Good Idea.
>
Does everyone agree with this? If yes, I can make a patch not to use
branch likely. But on the other hand, "gcc -mips2" will generate code
using branch likely. If branch likely doesn't buy you anything,
shouldn't we change gcc not to generate branch likely instructions?
H.J.