[SeaBIOS] insn prefixes?

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 09:15:11PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 09/29/2010 08:51 PM, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 08:19:33AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > That brings up an interesting question.  Do you know if instruction
> > prefixes result in slower cpu execution?  I know they bloat the code,
> > but it's not been clear to me if there is a speed impact (besides a
> > small cost to insn fetching).  Real mode execution is documented to be
> > slow, but it's unclear if using regular 32bit operations (via
> > prefixes) would be even slower, the same, or a little faster.
> > 
> On older processors they do slow down the CPU, on modern CPUs they
> generally don't, except for icache footprint, of course.
> 
> In general real mode execution is no slower than the corresponding
> protected mode.

Sorry - I meant: 16bit code segments are documented to be slow, but
it's unclear if using regular 32bit instructions in them (via
prefixes) would be even slower, the same, or faster.

> > BTW, I calculate that prefixes represent 12% of the seabios 16bit code
> > size (4720 of 38920 bytes).  I've found the code size with gcc (using
> > prefixes) was smaller than the code size was with bcc - largely due to
> > the optimizations and improved code structure that gcc enabled.
[...]
> I worked for a while on a 16-bit gcc backend... I kind of stopped
> because of perceived lack of interest, and it wasn't fully usable yet,
> but perhaps Seabios would be enough of a reason.  It seemed to produce
> code about 15% smaller than gcc with prefixes.
[...]
> Oh, yes, there is of course also OpenWatcom, which I personally had high
> hopes for ... and it is quite a good 16-bit compiler, it's just that
> I've found the OW community to not always have goals compatible with my
> needs, which of course are for a decent cross-compiler.

I don't think either would be worthwhile just to shrink the 16bit code
size.

Granted, the seabios memory macros (eg, GET_GLOBAL, GET_FARVAR,
GET_FLATPTR) are ugly.  However, since SeaBIOS handles real-mode,
bigreal-mode, 16bit protected mode, 32bit "flat" mode, 32bit mode with
segments, and 32bit segmented PIC mode, I doubt any normal 16bit
compiler could handle all of these without macros anyway.

-Kevin