Re: Why Plan 9 C compilers don't have asm("")

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to:  <[e-mail]>
By author:    "David S. Miller" <[e-mail]>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Rick Hohensee writes:
>  > Forth chips aren't modern in the true-multi-user sense, but if an
>  > individual were to design such a beast they could get several of them,
>  > hundreds maybe, on FPGAs available now. Such things are coming, because a 
>  > Forth chip IS something an individual can design.
> 
> And I suppose this zero-cost call is also handling things like keeping
> an N stage deep pipeline full during this call right?
> 

Believe it or not, that's actually a fairly simple part of the whole
machinery.  All you need for that is to maintain a call/return stack
in the front end of the pipe.  That way, a return that is indeed a
return can be speculated properly; obviously, if the speculation
doesn't work out when you get the return address in the execution
stage you suffer a branch mispredict penalty.

	-hpa
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