[fpc-devel] Stack alignment on i386

[Jonas Maebe]

On 22 Dec 2011, at 15:40, Sven Barth wrote:

> i386/Win32 should be adjusted then as well, because I suspect very  
> much that this is the reason for my problems with OpenCV... (on  
> Windows as well as on Linux)

 From what I understand from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa290049(v=vs.71).aspx 
, a function is required to align the stack to 8 or 16 bytes itself if  
it needs better alignment on win32. These links also all say the  
required alignment for win32 is 4 bytes:
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k1a8ss06.aspx : Some SSE  
types require eight-byte stack alignment, forcing the compiler to emit  
dynamic stack-alignment code.
* http://old.nabble.com/ATLAS-on-win32,-pthreads,-SSE-and-stack-alignment-p19828585.html 
  : in accordance win the Win32 ABI, only guarantees a 4-byte aligned  
stack
* http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/TopicWrongStackAlignment.html : this  
assumption can be wrong on Windows, where the stack is only guaranteed  
to have 4-byte alignment

You should probably add the flag -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 when  
compiling OpenCV for win32 using gcc: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2170667&group_id=23725&atid=379483

Also keep in mind that switching to 16 byte aligned stacks for  
existing targets
a) requires many assembler routines in the RTL to be disabled (or  
rewritten, but that was not done for Darwin/i386, in part because in  
many cases it can use faster libc equivalents anyway)
b) will probably break quite a bit assembler code from existing  
programs, both written for FPC and for Delphi (unless "nostackframe;"  
is added, the compiler will add stack alignment code to assembler  
routines which may mess up hardcoded offsets or other assumptions)


Jonas