Re: Register-passed arguments copied to the stack?

[Alexandre Courbot <Alexandre dot Courbot at lifl dot fr>]

> > But the callee makes something weird: at the beginning of the function,
> > it copies all the arguments it received on the stack instead of directly
> > using the register arguments.
>
> There are a number of reasons why this might happen.  Try stepping
> through the code in assign_parms in function.c to see why parameters get
> copied into either a pseudo or a stack slot.

Just seen it - you're right, register arguments always end up in the stack 
whatever happens.

> Are you compiling with optimization?  You didn't mention compilation
> options anywhere.  If you are compiling unoptimized, then yes, the
> parameter are supposed to be copied into stack slots.

I'm not using optimization - it's just that the behavior I'd like gcc to have 
is to use a certain class of registers to manipulate arguments. Since this 
class of registers is only used for this purpose, it doesn't need to save it 
by copying the arguments on the stack. I wanted that because I need to map 
the GCC representation to my abstract model. It's much easier to recognize an 
argument by a register number than by a stack entry. You can see this mail if 
you want more details: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-08/msg01321.html

So eventually it looks like there is no way to do this - I'll try to deal with 
stack entries, but it will produce sub-optimal code for my target.

Thanks!
Alex.