[fpc-devel] i386-linux switched to a 16 byte aligned stack

[J. Gareth Moreton]

It's a useful feature as far as hand-written and generated assembly 
language is concerned.  The Intel SIMD instruction sets work far better 
with aligned memory (e.g. you can use MOVAPS instead of MOVUPS, the 
former being faster on older CPUs but triggering a segmentation fault if 
the memory is unaligned). Granted, while vectorcall currently only works 
on x86_64-win64 because I was able to re-use the code for the System V 
ABI, with an aligned stack it might make it potentially easier to port 
it to i386-win32 eventually (under Microsoft Visual C++, __vectorcall is 
supported on 32-bit platforms by only using ECX and EDX as the integer 
registers... the same as __fastcall... speaking of 'fastcall' I do 
wonder if it's worth implementing that calling convention in case one 
wants to communicate with an external library that uses the convention).

Gareth aka. Kit

On 15/09/2019 21:07, Florian Klämpfl wrote:
> Am 15.09.19 um 19:35 schrieb Florian Klämpfl:
>> In r43005 to 43014 I committed a couple of patches so FPC generates 
>> stack frames aligned to 16 byte boundaries on i386-linux (before a 
>> call instruction, esp is dividable by 16). This is done because it 
>> seems that linux library start to depend on this property gcc ensures 
>> for around 20 years. To ensure this, FPC uses the same approach as 
>> clang (and as FPC for i386-darwin uses): esp has a fixed value 
>> fulfilling the alignment requirements during the whole procedure. 
>> Outgoing parameters are copied by mov instead of push instructions 
>> onto the stack. The consequences of these changes are:
>> - For pure pascal programs, this does not change anything. The 
>> resulting code might be slightly bigger but in turn floating point 
>> code might be faster as double values can be properly aligned now.
>> - Most assembler code is not affected by the change. Only code using 
>> constants to access the stack via esp might be affected, such code is 
>> rare.
>> - Assembler code calling other procedures should be adapted to keep 
>> the stack aligned to 16 byte boundaries as well. Assembler code 
>> working on i386-darwin fulfills this requirement already. The define 
>> FPC_STACKALIGNMENT contains the alignment of the stack (16 in the 
>> case of i386-linux).
>> - To test if the stack is always properly aligned, compile with -Ct: 
>> the stack checking code for i386-linux checks the stack alignment now 
>> as well.
>
> One thing (and actually an important one) I forgot to mention: this 
> means also that the regcall calling conventions we use by default on 
> i386-linux use now a caller-cleared stack. I forgot about because even 
> our regression tests did not find this. OTOH it means, that probably 
> little code out there is affected by this, an exception might be 
> PascalScript.
>
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