HELP: MIPS PC Relative Addressing

[Jiaxun Yang]

在 2021/2/25 上午5:40, Jim Wilson 写道:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 6:18 AM Jiaxun Yang <jiaxun.yang@flygoat.com 
> <mailto:jiaxun.yang@flygoat.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I found it's very difficult for GCC to generate this kind of pcrel_lo
>     expression,
>     RTX label_ref can't be lower into such LOW_SUM expression.
> 
> 
> Yes, it is difficult.  You need to generate a label, and put the label 
> number in an unspec in the auipc pattern, and then create a label_ref to 
> put in the addi.  The fact that we have an unspec and a label_ref means 
> a number of optimizations get disabled, like basic block duplication and 
> loop unrolling, because they can't make a copy of an instruction that 
> uses a label as data, as they have no way to know how to duplicate the 
> label itself.  Or at least RISC-V needs to create one label.  You 
> probably need to create two labels.
> 
> There is a far easier way to do this, which is to just emit an assembler 
> macro, and let the assembler generate the labels and relocs.  This is 
> what the RISC-V GCC port does by default.  This prevents some 
> optimizations like scheduling the two instructions, but enables some 
> other optimizations like loop unrolling.  So it is a tossup.  Sometimes 
> we get better code with the assembler macro, and sometimes we get better 
> code by emitting the auipc and addi separately.
> 
> The RISC-V gcc port can emit the auipc/addi with 
> -mexplicit-relocs -mcode-model=medany, but this is known to sometimes 
> fail.  The problem is that if you have an 8-byte variable with 8-byte 
> alignment, and try to load it with 2 4-byte loads, gcc knows that 
> offset+4 must be safe from overflow because the data is 8-byte aligned.  
> However, when you use a pc-relative offset that is data address-code 
> address, the offset is only as aligned as the code is.  RISC-V has 
> 2-byte instruction alignment with the C extension.  So if you have 
> offset+4 and offset is only 2-byte aligned, it is possible that offset+4 
> may overflow the add immediate field.  The same thing can happen with 
> 16-byte data that is 16-byte aligned, accessed with two 8-byte loads.  
> There is no easy software solution.  We just emit a linker error in that 
> case as we can't do anything else.  I think this would work better if 
> auipc cleared some low bits of the result, in which case the pc-relative 
> offset would have enough alignment to prevent overflow when adding small 
> offsets, but it is far too late to change how the RISC-V auipc works.
> 

Hi all,

After spending days poking with AUIPC, I suddenly found we indeed have 
ALUIPC
instruction in MIPS R6, which will clear low 16bit of AUIPC result.

So the whole thing now looks easier, we can have R_MIPS_PC_PAGE and 
R_MIPS_PC_OFST and avoid  all mess we met in RISC-V.

A pcrel loading could be as simple as:
aluipc     a0, %pcrel_page(sym)
addiu      a0, %pcrel_ofst(sym)

Thanks.

- Jiaxun