How much NEON state should be saved in a context switch? (xilinx zynq)

[Stephen Tether]

On 01/18/2015 10:19 PM, users-request at rtems.org wrote:
> the rule of thumb is to save/restore the volatile registers in the context switch and to save/restore the non-volatile registers in the exception epilogue/prologue. See also _ARMV4_Exception_interrupt.

I've looked at _ARMV4_Exception_interrupt. It appears to do this:

1. Changes from INT mode to SVC mode.
2. Saves the NEON registers D0-7 and D16-D31 on the SVC stack.
3. Switches back to the INT stack but remains in SVC mode.
4. Calls the BSP-level interrupt handlers.
5. Changes back to the SVC stack.
6. Calls _Thread_Dispatch() if a context switch is needed.
7. Restores D0-7 and D16-D31 from the SVC stack.


If the heir task is different from the executing task then 
_CPU_Context_Switch() gets called in step 6. It's there that D8-D15 get 
saved and restored using storage in the two TCBs.

This looks OK if there's no context switch since the volatile registers 
get saved to the SVC stack and then restored from the SVC stack. However 
if there is a context switch it looks as if the saved volatile register 
contents from the executing task are restored from the SVC stack just 
before control is given to the heir task. The context switching code 
doesn't seem to do anything with what's saved on the SVC stack.

- Steve