Re: [RFC/RFA] Proper mnemonics for VIA PadLock (i386) instructions

[Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>]

   Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 08:32:26 +1200
   From: Michal Ludvig <michal@logix.cz>

   Mark Kettenis wrote:
   > This one is a bit nasty.  The OpenBSD in-tree gas has had support for
   > the VIA PadLock instructions for a while.  Unfortunately that support
   > was never submitted for inclusion into the FSF tree.  A little over a
   > year ago Michal Ludvig committed support for these instructions.
   > Unfortunately he used mnemonics that differ from the instruction names
   > as used in the VIA documentation; the VIA names include a hyphen that
   > Michal left out.  I presume Michal did this because gas doesn't accept
   > hyphens in mnemonics.  That can be fixed though.  This patch does
   > that, and adds back the missing hyphen.  It also adds a missing
   > instruction that's going to be in the VIA cpu.
   > 
   > This patch keeps hyphen-less aliases for the instructions.  The gas
   > testsuite still passes with this patch applied.

   As long as the names without hyphen still exist I don't object.
   Coincidently in Linux Journal of May 05 there is an article about VIA
   PadLock that uses the current short names (obviously).

Code using the names without the hyphen will still assemble fine.

   However, what is the point of having two names for one instruction? Why
   not to support only the one without hyphen?

Because there is already code out there that uses the hyphen.  The
reason for preferring the hyphenated names over the unhyphenated names
is that the former are used by the VIA documentation.

Cheers,

Mark