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Re: HAL_THREAD_INIT_CONTEXT


Sergei Organov <osv@javad.ru> writes:

> And as far as I remember, TMS320C3/4x also have stack that grows upward, so
> there are at least 2 such processors that are supported by GCC. The problem
> with such processors could be solved by allowing HAL to define STACK_GROWS_UP
> macro that will be used then by the kernel to decide which end of the stack
> area to pass to the HAL as the stack base though.

Indeed, there are several areas where this would be needed, the
current code cannot cope as it is.

One of the reasons for only passing a stack pointer to
HAL_THREAD_INIT_CONTEXT() was to insulate it from stack direction
considerations. This also has unpleasant complications with 
Cyg_HardwareThread::increment_stack_limit(), since the value passed to
the HAL may not remain valid, or the HAL would have to update
Cyg_HardwareThread::stack_limit which would be difficult to
implement cleanly without breaking the abstraction layers.

> 
> As for FP support, while the issue with the interface is not resolved, I've
> decided to allocate space for FP context on the bottom of stack. For PPC it
> means all threads (even those that never use FP) need to have additional ~300
> bytes of stack. I'd like to have some graceful solution to the problem in the
> future though.
>

The approach I intended to take was to "statically" allocate the first
FP save area during HAL_THREAD_INIT_CONTEXT() and then dynamically
choose to allocate further FP save areas on the stack, below the
standard save area, depending on whether the current thread was using
the FPU and whether its previous FP save area was already in
use. Such an allocation would be cheap to do, since it is just an
extra decrement of the SP, and could be done at the same time as
disabling the FPU for use detection. If the thread retains FPU
ownership then this space is unused, but that is benign, since it must
have enough space on the stack to allocate it anyway. This approach
also allows us to use FP operations in interrupts, DSR and exceptions
more easily.

However, see the end of this message for what I believe is a better
approach to allocating the initial save area.


> My suggestion is to add 'stack_size' parameter to the HAL_THREAD_INIT_CONTEXT
> as soon as possible.

I would be happier with parameters giving the stack_base and
stack_top, since it is then up to the HAL which one is used to build
the initial context. Giving stack_ptr and stack_size continues to
introduce complication with stack direction.


> The later it will be done the more HALs will require to
> be changed. Two good things about such a change are that it doesn't break HALs
> silently and changing a HAL to the new interface is trivial. Anyway, it should 
> bring less troubles to HAL developers than, for example, switch to the CDL
> based configuration brought, I believe.
>

It is indeed a simple change, but we can only do it at a well defined
release point. I do not think it would be a good idea to change it
now in anoncvs when we have just made a release. It is something that
will need to be saved for the next proper release.


However, I am still not convinced that we actually need to make this
change, and have become even less convinced as I have been writing
this message.

I now think that the best approach to this is for the kernel to export
a C wrapper function: cyg_thread_increment_stack_limit() to the HAL
and for the HAL to call this when it needs to allocate the FP save
area. This makes the HAL->Kernel interface clean and well defined and
would be similar to existing functions exported from the kernel to the
HAL like cyg_interrupt_post_dsr() and interrupt_end().



-- 
Nick Garnett
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat Company
Cambridge, UK


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