Re: RFC: generic vector unit support?

On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 04:20:14PM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote:

I am not sure about what to do about ptrace.  We extended the interface
to have two new request types (PTRACE_GETVRREGS, PTRACE_SETVRREGS)
which return the full altivec state (all registers, vscr, vrsave).  We
could overload these request types to return all the 'vector' state
depending on which processor we are.  This would mean debuggers would
have to know which processor we are to know how big of a buffer to have
for ptrace calls, the memory layout, etc.

I'd rather see you do it the other way around:  Add PTRACE_GETSPEREGS
in the e500, so that the debugger can use ptrace to figure out which
registers are available.

We also extend generic vector idea to allow dumping of altivec/SPE
register state into core files (which we do not do currently).

That's a great idea.  Again, I think Altivec and SPE registers should
be tagged differently even though they can't coexist.

Otherwise, it sounds like a good idea to me.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer

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