Re: Scheduling x86 dispatch windows

[Quentin Neill <quentin.neill.gnu@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 5:23 PM, H.J. Lu <hjl.tools@gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> x86 assembler isn't an optimizing assembler. -mtune only does
> instruction selection.  What you are proposing sounds like an optimizing
> assembler to me. Are we going to support scheduling, macro, ...?
> --
> H.J.

Just to clarify, we are not doing scheduling or macros.   The
assembler already supported alignment and padding using .align and
friends, which can be from the compiler and from hand-written
assembly.

Now we are seeing more complex alignment rules that are not as simple
as it used to be for the older hardware.  It will be almost impossible
for an assembly programmer to insert the right directives, not to
mention any change might invalidate previous alignments.   Assembly
programmers will be out of luck (that is, unless the compiler becomes
the assembler).

The essence is we want to insert prefixes (as well as nops) according
to certain rules known at encoding time.  The mechanism implementing
these rules can be abstracted (table driven?) and could be applicable
to any hardware having similar features.

As gcc does not currently encode and/or generate object code, we are
wary of introducing such assembler functionality and want to avoid if
possible, instead leveraging the existing binutils infrastructure.

-- 
Quentin Neill (with some input from Reza Yazdani)