[LLVMdev] Stange behavior in fp arithmetics on x86 (bug possibly)

[Stephen Checkoway]

On Oct 7, 2014, at 2:26 PM, Tim Northover <t.p.northover at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Dmitry,
> 
> On 7 October 2014 10:50, Dmitry Borisenkov <d.borisenkov at samsung.com> wrote:
>> fpfail.s:26: Error: invalid instruction suffix for `ret'
>> 
>> I downloaded Intel manual and haven’t found any mention of retl instruction,
> 
> "retl" is the AT&T syntax for the normal "ret" instruction in the
> Intel manual, which makes it mostly undocumented.

Are you sure about that? I don't recall ever seeing retl before. A while back a reference for AT&T was mentioned and, as I recall, this was the best anyone had <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/817-5477/817-5477.pdf>. It contains no mention of retl.

This seems to be the commit that added support for it <http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-branch-commits/2010-May/003229.html>.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction between retl/retq. x86 has 4 return instruction (cribbing from the Intel manual):

C3	RET		Near return
CB	RET		Far return
C2 iw	RET imm16	Near return + pop imm16 bytes
CA iw	RET imm16	Far return + pop imm16 bytes

(And I think that's been true since the 8086.)

Distinguishing between near and far (e.g., ret vs. lret in AT&T or retn vs. retf with some other assemblers) makes sense, but what would a l or q suffix denote?

But more to the point, even if there's a good reason to accept retl/retq as input, is there any reason to emit it ever?

-- 
Stephen Checkoway