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

[Pasi Parviainen]

On 10.10.2014 9:48, Stephen Checkoway wrote:
>
> 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?
>

Since in x86 you can mix 16-bit and 32-bit code, therefore you must be 
able to distinguish between 16-bit and 32-bit return. And from there 
comes the w and l suffix for the return instruction.

code16:
ret = retw => C3
retl => 66 C3

code32:
ret = retl => C3
retw => 66 C3

And what comes to q suffix, it is either to be consistent or it just got 
cargo-culted.

Pasi