Re: PATCH: Fix ll/sc for mips (take 3)

["H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2002 at 01:53:23PM -0500, Justin Carlson wrote:
> 
> Actually, regardless of whether modern cpus implement it, I'd argue that
> avoiding the branch likely is a good idea for 2 reasons:
> 
> 1)  In the latest MIPS specs (mips32 and mips64) branch likelies have
> officially been deprecated as probable removals from the architecture in
> the not-too-distant future.
> 
> 2)  More importantly, most implementations don't use any sort of dynamic
> branch prediction on branch likelies.  They predict taken, always, since
> that's the specified intent (it's a branch *likely* to be taken).  For
> most spin locks, the normal behaviour is a fall through, not taking that
> branch, so you're inflicting a branch mispredict penalty on every  lock
> grabbed without contention.  Even for locks which the general case is
> contention, giving the processor branch predictor a chance to learn that
> is a Good Idea.
> 

Does everyone agree with this? If yes, I can make a patch not to use
branch likely. But on the other hand, "gcc -mips2" will generate code
using branch likely. If branch likely doesn't buy you anything, 
shouldn't we change gcc not to generate branch likely instructions?


H.J.