[llvm-dev] ARM64, dropping ADRP instructions, and ld.lld

[Eric Gorr via llvm-dev]

Thank you for providing the explanation for how ADRP works...something I
should have done myself.

With this explanation in hand, one other alternative I was looking at was
using a linkerscript to essentially rebase the code and have ADRP
instructions that would address the correct location as a result. However,
I am not a linkerscript expert, so I am not sure if such a thing is even
possible or would make much sense. However, it may provide a legitimate
shortcut to a solution which doesn't involve adding a feature to the
toolchain.


On Mon, May 21, 2018 at 9:04 AM, Tim Northover <t.p.northover at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 21 May 2018 at 13:57, Bruce Hoult via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> > "ADRL produces position-independent code, because the address is
> calculated
> > relative to PC."
> >
> > From this, I'd expect ADRP to simply do Xd <- PC + n*4096, where n is a
> 20
> > bit number, just like AUIPC in RISC-V (also a 20 literal multiplied by
> 4096)
> > or AUIPC in MIPS (16 bits multiplied by 65636 there).
>
> Afraid not. It really is (PC & ~0xfff) + n * 0x1000. So it does
> require 12-bit alignment of any code section.
>
> Now that you mention the MIPS & RISC-V alternatives, I'm not sure why
> ARM actually made that choice. It obviously saves you a handful of
> transistors but I can't quite believe that's all there is to it.
>
> Cheers.
>
> Tim.
>
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