Thread (18 messages) read the whole thread 18 messages, 4 authors, 2018-10-02

[PATCH] ARM: makefile: pass -march=armv4 to assembler even on CPU32v3

From: linux@armlinux.org.uk (Russell King - ARM Linux)
Date: 2018-10-01 17:56:34
Also in: lkml

On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 04:49:04AM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
Per the discussion about half-way down in [1], the kernel doesn't
actually support the ARMv3 ISA, but selects it for some ARMv4 ISA
hardware that benefits from ARMv3 code generation.
The issue is to do with the half-word stores in the ARMv4 ISA, which
need to be avoided on StrongARM RiscPC - the bus from the processor
card (which was designed for ARM610 and ARM710) does not support
anything except 8-bit and 32-bit accesses, so the 16-bit load/store
instructions don't work correctly.

Obviously, the reason for having the compiler use ARMv3 is to avoid
those instructions which we have no other way to prevent - however,
the use of ARMv3 with the assembler ensures that ldrh/strh are not
accidentally used.

We could argue that the ARMv3 assembly files are now stable, so the
chances of ldrh/strh being introduced is low, which would make this
change tolerable, but the commit message needs to spell out that
we lose this protection.
Such a consideration,
then, only applies to the compiler but not to the assembler. This commit
passes -march=armv4 to the assembler in those cases, so that code
written for ARMv4 will continue to compile and run fine, without needing
module-specific asflags-y overrides.
Note that "code written for ARMv4" will not be usable on this platform
if it makes use of ldrh/strh, so depending on which instructions the
assembler is complaining about, it could very well be a real "you're
doing something wrong" case.

The side effect of this patch is that such cases will now be hidden
rather than evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

-- 
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