Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/18] target-arm cleanup

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

> On the code itself, I don't really like the remaining, new_tmp(),
> dead_tmp(), and even more the fact that some functions can allocate
> (e.g load_reg) or free (e.g. store_reg) some TCG variables implicitely.
> This is a way to make errors by reallocating or forgetting to free some
> 
> variables, and that leads to strange code like:
> |    if (rn == 15) {
> |        tmp = new_tmp();
> |        tcg_gen_movi_i32(tmp, 0);
> |    } else {
> |        tmp = load_reg(s, rn);
> |    }

There is actually logic behind this
Consider the obvious implementation of the "neg" instruction:

val = load_reg(rn);
tcg_gen_neg_i32(val, val);
store_reg(rd, val);

With the current code this is safe. However if load_reg returns cpu_R[n] 
instead of a temporary then the above code will incorrectly clobber the source 
register.

My theory was that tracking down an accidental write to a source register is 
much harder than tracking down a mismatched temporary.

Paul