This is the mail archive of the
libc-alpha@sourceware.org
mailing list for the glibc project.
Re: [PATCH] powerpc: New feature - HWCAP/HWCAP2 bits in the TCB
- From: Steven Munroe <munroesj at linux dot vnet dot ibm dot comcom>
- To: Rich Felker <dalias at libc dot org>
- Cc: munroesj at linux dot vnet dot ibm dot com, "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at redhat dot com>, libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2015 08:26:46 -0500
- Subject: Re: [PATCH] powerpc: New feature - HWCAP/HWCAP2 bits in the TCB
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <55760314 dot 6070601 at linux dot vnet dot ibm dot com> <20150609163835 dot GI17573 at brightrain dot aerifal dot cx> <1435777940 dot 7125 dot 132 dot camel at oc7878010663> <5596C284 dot 9070108 at redhat dot com> <1436145404 dot 10792 dot 46 dot camel at oc7878010663> <20150706021300 dot GU1173 at brightrain dot aerifal dot cx>
- Reply-to: munroesj at linux dot vnet dot ibm dot com
On Sun, 2015-07-05 at 22:13 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 05, 2015 at 08:16:44PM -0500, Steven Munroe wrote:
> > > I've suggested to Carlos that this is a problem with the use of the
> > > TCB. If one uses the TCB, one should add a dummy symbol that is versioned
> > > and tracks when you added the feature, and thus you can depend upon it,
> > > but not call it, and that way you get the right versioning. The same
> > > problem happened with stack canaries and it's still painfully annoying
> > > at the distribution level.
> >
> > This is completely unnecessary. The load associated with
> > __builtin_cpu_supports() will work with any GLIBC what support TLS and
> > the worst that will happen is it will load zeros.
>
> That's bad enough -- there are applications of hwcap where you NEED
> the correct value, not some (possibly empty) subset of the bits. For
> example if you need to know which registers to save/restore in an aync
> context-switching setup (rolling your own makecontext/swapcontext) or
> if you're implementing a function which has a special calling
> convention with a contract not to clobber any but a small fixed set of
> registers, but it might callback to arbitrary code in a rare case (ala
> __tls_get_addr or tls descriptor functions).
>
No! any application that uses HWCAP and or __builtin_cpu_supports, has
to program for when the feature is not available. The feature bit is
either true or false.
The dword we are talking about is already allocated and has been since
the initial implementation of TLS. For the PowerPC ABIs we allocated a
full 4K for the TCB and use negative displacement calculations that work
well with our ISA.
None of the existing TCB field offsets change. So this add is completely
upward compatible with all current GLIBC version.
None on the issues you suggest exist in the this proposal
> However I don't even see how you can be confident that you'll read
> zeros. Is the TCB field before this new field you're adding
> always-zero?
>
The TCB is allocated as part of the thread stack which is mmap, which
kernel initializes to all zero.
> Rich
>