[fpc-devel] cortex-m0 support

[Jeppe Græsdal Johansen]

Den 05-01-2012 03:35, David Welch skrev:
>
> With the cortex-m0 parts now hitting the market I think it is time to 
> bring up the topic of thumb support again, not arm not thumb2 but 
> thumb (the only common instruction set across almost the entire arm 
> family (the exception being the pre-armv4t)).
>
> cortex-m0 and -m1 are armv6-m based, the -m3 and -m4 are armv7m based.
>
> I count something like 20 armv6m instructions that are not in the all 
> thumb variants category.  something like 148 armv7m that are not 
> supported by armv6m nor all thumb variants.  Just a rough count.
>
> This is why you will see folks saying that the cortex-m0 and -m1 are 
> thumb only not thumb2.
>
> The cortex-m0 based mbed's have hit the street btw, available at 
> sparkfun and other places.  Note that gcc and llvm fail to build 
> working code for the cortex-m0, when you specify cortex-m0 you get 
> thumb2 code which fails miserably.
>
> David
Looks like it basically only has some branching instructions that can be 
32 bit, and thus use R8-R15. This means it'll be pretty easy to create a 
cg sharing a heap of code with the thumb2 cg.

An interesting idea however, could be to create a real Thumb cg, and let 
the Thumb2(armv7m) and Armv6m cg extend that. That would give the 
benefit that fpc could generate Thumb code on older platforms too