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Re: RFC: A new MIPS64 ABI
- From: Matt Thomas <jabbathespud at gmail dot com>
- To: David Daney <ddaney at caviumnetworks dot com>
- Cc: GCC <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>, binutils <binutils at sourceware dot org>, Prasun Kapoor <prasun dot kapoor at caviumnetworks dot com>
- Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:15:08 -0800
- Subject: Re: RFC: A new MIPS64 ABI
- References: <4D5990A4.2050308@caviumnetworks.com>
On Feb 14, 2011, at 12:29 PM, David Daney wrote:
> Background:
>
> Current MIPS 32-bit ABIs (both o32 and n32) are restricted to 2GB of
> user virtual memory space. This is due the way MIPS32 memory space is
> segmented. Only the range from 0..2^31-1 is available. Pointer
> values are always sign extended.
>
> Because there are not already enough MIPS ABIs, I present the ...
>
> Proposal: A new ABI to support 4GB of address space with 32-bit
> pointers.
>
> The proposed new ABI would only be available on MIPS64 platforms. It
> would be identical to the current MIPS n32 ABI *except* that pointers
> would be zero-extended rather than sign-extended when resident in
> registers. In the remainder of this document I will call it
> 'n32-big'. As a result, applications would have access to a full 4GB
> of virtual address space. The operating environment would be
> configured such that the entire lower 4GB of the virtual address space
> was available to the program.
I have to wonder if it's worth the effort. The primary problem I see
is that this new ABI requires a 64bit kernel since faults through the
upper 2G will go through the XTLB miss exception vector.
> At a low level here is how it would work:
>
> 1) Load a pointer to a register from memory:
>
> n32:
> LW $reg, offset($reg)
>
> n32-big:
> LWU $reg, offset($reg)
That might be sufficient for userland, but the kernel will need
to do similar things (even if a 64bit kernel) when accessing
structures supplied by 32-bit syscalls.
It seems to be workable but if you need the additional address space
why not use N64?