Re: DragonflyBSD fast syscall support and x86 improvements

["Thomas E. Spanjaard" <tgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     For better or for worse, the IA32 ABI is stack-based.  Believe me,
>     being an old Amiga guy I would *LOVE* to see the registerized call
>     standard be the default rather then a special GCC '__blah' qualifier.

Well, the ISA is, but the underlying micro architecture isn't. The ISA 
doesn't expose the problems with memory access in stack-based languages, 
but the CPUs do experience those. With a Hobbit or ARM with Java 
extensions you would have less of an issue with this. So I think you can 
get real performance advantages when optimizing for the actual RISC 
register-based core behind the IA32 ISA. How is a bit of a problem, 
since you can't use the whole lot of registers actually available due to 
register renaming, but I think x86-64 in 64b long mode has more GP 
registers available, no? An optimization for AMD64 (together with a port 
of DragonFlyBSD to it ;)) would be very, very neat :).

Cheers,
--
        Thomas E. Spanjaard
        tgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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