MIPS branch out of range

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 199905241931.MAA01491@pizda.davem.net >you write:
  >    Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 12:29:00 -0700
  >    From: Jim Wilson <wilson@cygnus.com>
  > 
  >    We can avoid the problem by measuring instruction lengths in bytes
  >    instead of instruction counts.
  > 
  > So, in essence, the issue is that branch shortening speaks the
  > language of bytes and therefore this is the language the instruction
  > length values should speak as well, correct?
Effectively, yes.

In addition to Jim's loop alignment example, I believe the code to compute
the size of ADDR_VEC/ADDR_DIFF_VEC counts them as bytes based on the mode
of the ADDR_DIFF.

This is what finally caused me to bite the bullet and fix the PA -- each
ADDR_VEC entry is 8 bytes (2 insns).  Unfortunately the backend was counting
instructions.  So the branch shortening code over-estimated the size of each
jump table by 4x.  That over-estimation was adding up and causing long
branches instead of short ones in some code the UofU found important.


jeff