[Openmcl-devel] Inline assembly?

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On Aug 26, 2009, at 6:08 AM, Jianshi Huang wrote:

> I'm reading the source code of ccl's backend. Currently the x86  
> backend
> does not support emitting SSE instructions.
>
> I'm wondering how much effort does it take to add SSE instruction
> support? Is alignment in the GC a problem?
>
> If only the compiler backend needs modification I'd like to volunteer
> for the work.

We do use some mmx/sse/sse2 instructions:  scalar floating point  
operations and some more exotic ones (like pmuldq) in bignum  
operations (see the source for %multiply-and-add-loop on a 64-bit  
lisp, for example), but it's true that the assembler doesn't recognize  
all of them.

These instructions are defined at around line 2987 of  
ccl:compiler;X86;x86-asm.lisp.

Adding more instructions is not too difficult once you figure out what  
the def-x86-opcode macro is expecting.

If you need 16-byte alignment (for instance, in order to use movapd or  
whatever), then you generally have to ensure proper alignment yourself  
somehow.

All heap-allocated lisp objects are doublenode (8 bytes on x8632, 16  
bytes on x8664) aligned.  Double-floats are 8-byte aligned on both  
platforms.  The elements of vectors have natural alignment.

http://ccl.clozure.com/ccl-documentation.html#Tagging-scheme talks  
about how objects are represented in memory in a little more detail.

If you send a patch (or patches) to add more SSE instructions, I'll be  
glad to commit it.

If I'm not answering your questions, please don't hesitate to ask for  
clarification.