[fpc-devel] OO rewrite - technical questions

[Michael Schnell]

  On 07/20/2010 04:11 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
>
>> BTW what about GS ? If same is just restored after preemption, this 
>> could be used by the compiler to point to the Threadvar area.
>
> Since it turned out that loading segment registers is very time 
> consuming on newer (i486+) processors, the memory management was 
> changed from segmented (16 bit) into paged (32 bit flat). Segment 
> registers never should be changed by an application, 
Not really, The OS needs to set the segment registers, anyway, when 
returning to a preempted thread or process, otherwise it needs to be 
clearly documented that the user program is not supposed to use them at 
all. Assigning some value - e.g.the pointer to the threadvar area - to 
e.g. GS would not harm performance-wise.
> it should be left to the OS process/thread scheduler and thread-API 
> calls.
If a register is not predefined by the OS (such as GS on WIN32), I think 
the ABI should inform the ASM programmer about how to use it. Simply 
stating "all other registers need to be preserved by the callee" would 
suffice and answer the original question about if the compiler would 
need to safe GS in case an "external" function might trash it.

Moreover of course the ABI should clearly state how an ASM function is 
supposed to create threadvars, anyway.

-Michael