Linux MIPS Architecture development
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
To: Ronny Meeus <ronny.meeus@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-mips@linux-mips.org
Subject: Re: 2GB userspace limitation in ABI N32
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 10:07:56 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20121010080756.GC6740@linux-mips.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAMJ=MEfFsJH6Cqkow7-w3a352iYiWWi+ubOSJaqhh2bp2MqPZg@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 08:32:47AM +0200, Ronny Meeus wrote:

> I have a legacy application that we want to port to a MIPS (Cavium)
> architecture from a PPC based one.
> The board has 4GB memory of which we actually need almost 3GB in
> application space. On the PPC this is no issue since the split
> user/kernel is 3GB/1GB.
> We have to use the N32 ABI Initial tests on MIPS showed me the
> user-space limit of 2GB.
> We do not want to port the application to a 64bit
> 
> Now the question is: are there any workarounds, tricks existing to get
> around this limitation?
> I found some mailthreads on this subject (n32-big ABI -
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-02/msg00278.html,
> http://elinux.org/images/1/1f/New-tricks-mips-linux.pdf) but is looks
> like this is not accepted by the community. Is there any process
> planned or made in this area?

I think limited time and gain killed the propoosed ABI rather than
theoretical issues raised.  Other architectures such as i386 - well,
IIRC any 32-bit ABI with more than 2GB userspace and a signed
ptrdiff_t - are suffering from them as well.

Also there's limited gain and even more limited time to implement things ...

  Ralf

  reply	other threads:[~2012-10-10  8:08 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-10-10  6:32 2GB userspace limitation in ABI N32 Ronny Meeus
2012-10-10  8:07 ` Ralf Baechle [this message]
2012-10-10 12:57   ` Rich Felker
2012-10-10 16:56     ` David Daney
2012-10-10 17:10       ` Maciej W. Rozycki
2012-10-10 17:34         ` David Daney
2012-10-10 17:49           ` Ronny Meeus
2012-10-10 18:08             ` David Daney
2012-10-10 15:12   ` Ronny Meeus
2012-10-12 10:18     ` Ralf Baechle

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20121010080756.GC6740@linux-mips.org \
    --to=ralf@linux-mips.org \
    --cc=linux-mips@linux-mips.org \
    --cc=ronny.meeus@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox