Re: anybody tried NPTL?

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 01:44:47PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> Personally, I favor doing the low-overhead syscall for o32 and then
> moving to the new ABI that MIPS is talking about with a thread
> register.

I was always wondering how far gcc could optimize code to minimize this
special system call.  After all on Alpha something similar PAL-code based
was the method of choice.

> I'm not sure what to do about n32/n64.

I believe N32 / N64 are not widespead enough yet to be a big roadblock
for moving to new ABIs.  Whoever disagress should better speak up soon :-)

If we deciede to move to something entirely different than the existing
ABIs in the future will be able to support compatibility the same way
we're already doing.

> > Other crazy ideas did include a per-thread mapping containing the thread
> > pointer - and possibly more information in the future.
> 
> Does MIPS have an efficient way to do this for SMP?

It can be done making the TLB fault for that page about as expensive as
a null syscall.

> > On the positive side if we had multiple register sets on a MIPSxx V2
> > processor we could exploit that to get rid of this overheade and do
> > other nice optimizations for TLB reload also.  Unfortunately these
> > register sets are optional feature of the architecture only.
> 
> That's more or less what was talked about for ARM v6.

I'm unARMed here ;-)

  Ralf