Followup to: <200111171920.fAHJKjJ01550@penguin.transmeta.com>
By author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> In article <20011117161436.B23331@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> you write:
> >
> >They don't need to be. On i386, the flags are (partly for historical reasons) clobbered
> >by default.
>
> However, this is one area where I would just be tickled pink if gcc were
> to allow asm's to return status in eflags, even if that means that we
> need to fix all our existing asms.
>
> We have some really _horrid_ code where we use operations that
> intrinsically set the flag bits, and we actually want to use them.
> Using things like cmpxchg, and atomic decrement-and-test-with-zero have
> these horrid asm statements that have to move the eflags value (usually
> just one bit) into a register, so that we can tell gcc where it is.
>
The clean way to do that would be for gcc to implement _Bool, the C99
boolean data type, and add a new kind of register for the flags, i.e.
_Bool c;
asm volatile(LOCK "subl %2,%0"
: "=m" (v->counter), "=zf" (c)
: "ir" (i), "0" (v->counter) : "memory", "cc");
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 23 2001 - 21:00:16 EST