[Vm-dev] [GSoC] ARM JIT

[Lars]

Hello,
at the moment I'm fleshing out the ARM Compiler. Last week in my mentor 
meeting, we decided that it would be ok to ask any questions I have 
here. These questions might not be of much interest for anybody but 
Eliot, because they are quite specific about the internals of Cog.

When trying to fill in genSaveRegisters, I noticed that there is no 
genLoadRegisters. Where are the registers saved in that method loaded 
again? Also, I don't know what trampolines are. The term has too many 
meanings to find anything useful using google. And cog-related, there is 
only the article "An Arranged Marriage". In that, an understanding seems 
required. Do you have any more sources where I can read about 
trampolines? Or can point to the paragraph where they are explained?

We last week talked about the Call-Opcode and that some Instructions 
require that after a Call, the first item on the stack is the jump back 
address. On ARM, there is no Call which pushes the PC, but rather an 
BL-opcode, which loads the next pc into the LR-register. If I want to 
save LR, I need to do it as preamble of the next function. Where would 
be the place to prepend this pushing of LR ( and other callee-safe 
registers ) onto the stack?

I also looked over the conditional Jumping codes and added them. But 
there seems to be some ambiguity on ARM. Especially about 'unordered' 
and 'less than'. The 'less than' condition also is also true in case the 
VFP generated an unordered. For the non-fp codes, I found a list what 
they mean for the processor flags on x86, thus being able to map them 
onto the 15 ARM conditional codes. Does anybody have (a link to) a list 
of the flag-interpretation for FP-state (as used in IA32 and probably in 
cog)?

Thank you,
Lars

P.S.: My development process is starting the CogVMSimulator on an 
Trunk43 image and filling in all the methods missing with best guesses 
(and they are legion). The snippet for starting the simulator (provided 
by Eliot) is:
  | cos  opts |
  CoInterpreter initializeWithOptions: (opts := Dictionary newFromPairs: 
#(#ISA #ARMV5)).
  CogVMSimulator chooseAndInitCogitClassWithOpts: opts.
  cos := CogVMSimulator new.
  cos desiredNumStackPages: 8.
  cos openOn: 'CogTrunk43.image'.
  ^ cos openAsMorph; halt; run