Re: Build failure for R3000 DECstation

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2000 at 10:30:17PM +0100, Harald Koerfgen wrote:

> > Obviously none of them seemed to care so now I'm doing the quick fix.
> > Frankly, a syscall which shouldn't be used doesn't deserve more attention ...
> 
> Well, it seems as if there are people with a different opinion. Fresh from the
> glibc CVS (libc/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/mips/sys/tas.h):

I know.  Otherwise I'd have plain killed this syscall rsn.

> Personally I like this more than a kernel ll/sc emulation. A syscall is likely
> to be faster than at least two illegal instruction exceptions. If you're
> concerned about binary compatibilty, the syscall should work on ISA>=2 CPUs as
> well.

The idea is to punish the least widespread architecture and this are the
non-ll/sc CPUs.  Just like Linux is no longer performing optimally on x86.

In any case, for uniprocessor non-ll/sc machines there is also a better
solution availble with no syscalls at all.  It's easy to implement, just
use the fact that any exception will change the values of k0/k1.  That of
course breaks silently on SMP.

glibc 2.2 calls this sysmips(). very often so optimizing them is fairly
important ...

  Ralf