Re: [PATCH] x86: Add optimized popcnt variants

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Feb 22 2010 - 15:41:07 EST


On 02/22/2010 10:49 AM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
>>
>> Just a note: this still means rdi is clobbered on x86-64, which is
>> probably fine, but needs to be recorded as such. Since gcc doesn't
>> support clobbers for registers used as operands (sigh), you have to
>> create a dummy output and assign it a "=D" constraint.
>>
>> I don't know if gcc would handle -fcall-saved-rdi here... and if so, how
>> reliably.
>
> Ok, from looking at kernel/sched.s output it looks like it saves rdi
> content over the alternative where needed. I'll do some more testing
> just to make sure.
>

No, you can't rely on behavioral observation. A different version of
gcc could behave differently. We need to make sure we tell gcc what the
requirements actually are, as opposed to thinking we can just fix them.

+#define POPCNT ".byte 0xf3\n\t.byte 0x48\n\t.byte 0x0f\n\t.byte
0xb8\n\t.byte 0xc7"

BTW, this can be written:

#define POPCNT ".byte 0xf3,0x48,0x0f,0xb8,0xc7"

-hpa
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