Re: [Patch, avr] Relax LDS/STS to IN/OUT if symbol is in I/O address range

[Senthil Kumar Selvaraj <senthil_kumar dot selvaraj at atmel dot com>]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 08:08:37PM +0400, Denis Chertykov wrote:
> 2014-09-29 14:45 GMT+04:00 Senthil Kumar Selvaraj
> <senthil_kumar.selvaraj@atmel.com>:
> >
> > The patch below adds linker relaxation support for rewriting LDS/STS
> > instructions to IN/OUT where appropriate. The IN/OUT instruction is
> > shorter by a couple of bytes, and executes a cycle quicker. The
> > compiler already does this optimization for addresses known at
> > compile time - this linker patch does it for the rest.
> >
> > The patch looks for R_AVR_16 relocations, and if it finds an
> > LDS/STS instruction with the symbol value (i.e. address) in I/O range,
> > rewrites it to use IN/OUT instead, adjusting the address for SFR offsets.
> >
> > The patch also includes a couple of test cases to verify that it works
> > for tiny, mega and xmega archs, and to ensure I/O range check is
> > implemented correctly.
> >
> > If ok, could someone commit please? I don't have commit access.
> 
> Generally, I don't like this.
> The compiler already does this optimization.
> May be somebody want to have LDS/STS instead of IN/OUT.
> (Calc delay)

Hmm, but can't you make that argument for all linker relaxations (jmp ->
rjmp, for e.g.)? Besides, this relaxation kicks in only if there is a
relocation - a plain lds <register> <constant_address> won't get rewritten
unless a .reloc directive is used to forcibly emit a relocation. And of
course, the user can simply choose to NOT pass --relax to the linker.

The reason this patch came about was some (inline assembly) code in 
avr-libc (wdt.h) that has conditional compilation branches for 
emitting LDS/STS vs IN/OUT based on the device name. We figured it 
would be simpler to let the linker deal with it instead.

Regards
Senthil