[LLVMdev] cortex-m{3,4} special registers

[James Molloy]

Hi Kurt, Jim,

I took the liberty of working on this today.

The patch has become a bit of a frankenpatch, for the reasons listed out below
and so I won't be able to submit it until tomorrow.

The actual fix itself was very straightforward, but exposed a failing in the
FixedLenInstructionDecoder in that it does not support instruction predicates
such as "IsThumb2".

Generally this is fine, however MRS has different encodings in v{6,7}m and
v{6,7}{a,r} - the encodings are not sufficiently different to deterministically
tell them apart without subtarget specific information.

I can encode that as instruction predicates (, Requires<[IsMClass]>, assuming
I've added a new predicate 'IsMClass'), but getting the generated decoder to be
subtarget-dependent was quite an invasive change. I also had to do the same with
the MCInstPrinter - it can't know whether to print mask names for the M-series
or the AR-series without a SubtargetInfo.

I'd like to know if yourself or perhaps Owen/Eric has any input on the track I'm
going down. From my (possibly tunnel-visioned) perspective it's the only logical
solution, and I'm surprised that having the parser/printer operate without
subtarget specific knowledge hasn't caused issues before.

Cheers,

James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On
> Behalf Of Jim Grosbach
> Sent: 29 August 2011 18:06
> To: Kurt Lidl
> Cc: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] cortex-m{3,4} special registers
> 
> Hi Kurt,
> 
> The assembly parser doesn't (yet) handle these, you're right. Currently,
> the MRS instruction is split into two variants in the ARMInstrThumb2.td
> file, t2MRS and t2MRSsys, one for the user mode version reading cpsr and
> one for the system mode version reading spsr. MSR, by contrast, has a
> custom parse method for the mask operand since it's a bit more complex than
> an either/or.
> 
> You'll likely want to merge the two MRS variants into one and add an
> operand for the system register, mapping that to the proper encoding bits
> in the instruction, and use a custom parse method to map the register names
> to the appropriate bit values. The current MSR parse method should give a
> basic idea of how to do that.
> 
> Once you have something, post a proposed patch to llvm-commits and we'll
> have a look and work through any implementation details.
> 
> Regards,
> -Jim
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 28, 2011, at 1:02 PM, Kurt Lidl wrote:
> 
> > I was attempting to compile some code with a recent (r138716)
> > version of llvm/clang, targeting a cortex-m4 processor.
> >
> > And I get an error like this:
> >
> > CC:  sched_garbage.c
> > In file included from sched_garbage.c:43:
> > In file included from ./os_internal.h:48:
> > In file included from /p/nuttx/trunk/nuttx/include/sched.h:47:
> > In file included from /p/nuttx/trunk/nuttx/include/nuttx/sched.h:54:
> > In file included from /p/nuttx/trunk/nuttx/include/nuttx/irq.h:67:
> > In file included from /p/nuttx/trunk/nuttx/include/arch/irq.h:60:
> > /p/nuttx/trunk/nuttx/include/arch/armv7-m/irq.h:186:6: error: invalid
> operand
> >      for instruction
> >     "\tmrs    %0, primask\n"
> >     ^
> > <inline asm>:1:14: note: instantiated into assembly here
> >                mrs    r5, primask
> >                           ^
> >
> > This appears to be due to llvm lacking support for the various
> > cortex-m{3,4} special registers.  ("primask", "faultmask", etc)
> >
> >
> http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0491c/ch05s1
> 3s01.html
> >
> > Can someone tell me how I would go about adding support for these
> > special registers?
> >
> > -Kurt
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