Ram initialization and small c.

[Eric W. Biederman]

Peter Stuge <stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org> writes:

> On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 11:25:18AM -0500, Jeremy Jackson wrote:
> > Another idea on the subject:
> > 
> > On some chipsets, the entire range of supported processors have MMX and
> > maybe SSE/SSE2.  MMX gives 8 extra 64 bit registers (nobody uses
> > floating-point in LinuxBIOS, right?) that can be used as 32bit.  They
> > can't be used as address/index/base, but only for data. See the MOVD
> > instruction.
> 
> Likewise, st0..st7 in the FPU could be used as a stack-like 8x64bit data
> storage, IIRC. 

There are no register to register moves from the integer registers
to the floating point registers, unless I missed some.  The data
we care about is integer data, and so any extra registers just act
as overflow locations that are used instead of the stack.  

> I seem to remember that Pentium MMX CPUs share st* space
> with MMX registers however, so for those platforms one of them will have
> to do.

As I recall you can only access one of them at a time,
but it doesn't matter if there are no register->register transfers.

Anyway for those wondering where I am at.  I currently have
a compiler that gets as far as intermediate code for a useful
subset of C expressions.  Now I just have to do some optimizer work,
and an actual code generator.

Mostly for the optimizer side I am initially concerned about doing
a good job of register allocation.   

Hopefully I can have something someone else can play with by the start
of next week...  

Eric