Powerpc IRQ handling breaks strict EABI compliance

till strauman at slac.stanford.edu
Wed Feb 12 17:16:14 UTC 2003


Joel Sherrill wrote:

>
>Till Straumann wrote:
>
>>Joel Sherrill wrote:
>>
>>>Sergei Organov wrote:
>>>
>>>>Till Straumann <strauman at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> writes:
>>>>
>>>>>OK, I fixed the motorola/shared BSP to not clobber R2/R13 anymore.
>>>>>However, the question remains:
>>>>>
>>>>> - who is responsible for the setup (calling __eabi()) ?
>>>>>   RTEMS or application code?
>>>>>
>>>>It's main() that when compiled with corresponding gcc switches automatically
>>>>invokes __eabi(). It basically only setups R2/R13. BTW, R13 is being used even
>>>>without EABI -- R13 usage is part of SYSV ABI which EABI is derived from.
>>>>
>>>>This brings another interesting problem. In older days of RTEMS the 'main' was
>>>>part of RTEMS, not the part of application code, so it was invoked very early
>>>>and thus all RTEMS/BSP initialization went after __eabi() has been called.
>>>>AFAIK, now situation is different and __eabi() will be invoked too late. It
>>>>means that RTEMS startup code should invoke __eabi() (or setup R13/R2 itself)
>>>>for things to work correctly as C startup/initialization code compiled for
>>>>SYSV ABI/EABI will already rely on correct values in R2/R13.
>>>>
>>>
>>>RTEMS now ensures that the first thread to execute invokes the
>>>appropriate
>>>routine for that gcc target to run global constructors.  The
>>>powerpc-rtems
>>>gcc target is noted as being an init/fini target so it will call
>>>_init().
>>>
>>>
>>OK, I saw that bsp_specs have been updated to include crtbegin/crtend.
>>However, how do you prevent from initialization happening twice if
>>the user uses 'main'?
>>
>
>My memory is that the __init functions have a boolean variable that
>say they have been executed already.
>

I disassembled some code and it doesn't look like there is such a flag. 
__eabi() implements
such a guard, however and so does gcc's 'main' header (on architectures 
who don't have
.init/.fini sections) before calling __init(). (I still could be wrong...)

-- Till

>
>>-- Till.
>>
>>>>What I want to tell is that using of SYSV ABI/EABI indeed makes code smaller
>>>>and faster, so it'd be fine if PPC port of RTEMS starts to support it again
>>>>(the old RTEMS 3.x code did support it, BTW).
>>>>
>>>
>>>The application owning main() was generally viewed as an improvement. :)
>>>
>>>In the olden days, main() happened too early and drivers were not yet
>>>initialized.
>>>This lead to situations where global constructors could not print or do
>>>other operations.
>>>
>>>
>>>>--
>>>>Sergei.
>>>>
>>>
>






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