Re: Resend: [PATCH] [MIPS] Fix asm constraints for 'ins' instructions.

[Richard Sandiford <rdsandiford@googlemail.com>]

David Daney <ddaney@avtrex.com> writes:
> Ralf Baechle wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:04:25AM -0700, David Daney wrote:
>> 
>>> The third operand to 'ins' must be a constant int, not a register.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: David Daney <ddaney@avtrex.com>
>>> ---
>>> include/asm-mips/bitops.h |    6 +++---
>>> 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>>>
>>> diff --git a/include/asm-mips/bitops.h b/include/asm-mips/bitops.h
>>> index 6427247..9a7274b 100644
>>> --- a/include/asm-mips/bitops.h
>>> +++ b/include/asm-mips/bitops.h
>>> @@ -82,7 +82,7 @@ static inline void set_bit(unsigned long nr, volatile 
>>> unsigned long *addr)
>>>             "2:     b       1b                                      \n"
>>>             "       .previous                                       \n"
>>>             : "=&r" (temp), "=m" (*m)
>>> -           : "ir" (bit), "m" (*m), "r" (~0));
>>> +           : "i" (bit), "m" (*m), "r" (~0));
>>> #endif /* CONFIG_CPU_MIPSR2 */
>>>     } else if (cpu_has_llsc) {
>>>             __asm__ __volatile__(
>> 
>> An old trick to get gcc to do the right thing.  Basically at the stage when
>> gcc is verifying the constraints it may not yet know that it can optimize
>> things into an "i" argument, so compilation may fail if "r" isn't in the
>> constraints.  However we happen to know that due to the way the code is
>> written gcc will always be able to make use of the "i" constraint so no
>> code using "r" should ever be created.
>> 
>> The trick is a bit ugly; I think it was used first in asm-i386/io.h ages ago
>> and I would be happy if we could get rid of it without creating new problems.
>> Maybe a gcc hacker here can tell more?
>
> It is not nice to lie to GCC.
>
> CCing GCC and Richard in hopes that a wider audience may shed some light on 
> the issue.

You _might_ be able to use "i#r" instead of "ri", but I wouldn't
really recommend it.  Even if it works now, I don't think there's
any guarantee it will in future.

There are tricks you could pull to detect the problem at compile time
rather than assembly time, but that's probably not a big win.  And again,
I wouldn't recommend them.

I'm not saying anything you don't know here, but if the argument is
always a syntactic constant, the safest bet would be to apply David's
patch and also convert the function into a macro.  I notice some other
ports use macros rather than inline functions here.  I assume you've
deliberately rejected macros as being too ugly though.

Richard