[PATCH i386] Allow sibcalls in no-PLT PIC
H.J. Lu
hjl.tools@gmail.com
Wed May 20 12:40:00 GMT 2015
On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Michael Matz <matz@suse.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 19 May 2015, Richard Henderson wrote:
>
>> It is. The relaxation that HJ is working on requires that the reads
>> from the got not be hoisted. I'm not especially convinced that what
>> he's working on is a win.
>>
>> With LTO, the compiler can do the same job that he's attempting in the
>> linker, without an extra nop. Without LTO, leaving it to the linker
>> means that you can't hoist the load and hide the memory latency.
>
> Well, hoisting always needs a register, and if hoisted out of a loop
> (which you all seem to be after) that register is live through the whole
> loop body. You need a register for each different called function in such
> loop, trading the one GOT pointer with N other registers. For
> register-starved machines this is a real problem, even x86-64 doesn't have
> that many. I.e. I'm not convinced that this hoisting will really be much
> of a win that often, outside toy examples. Sure, the compiler can hoist
> function addresses trivially, but I think it will lead to spilling more
> often than not, or alternatively the hoisting will be undone by the
> register allocators rematerialization. Of course, this would have to be
> measured for real not hand-waved, but, well, I'd be surprised if it's not
> so.
>
We should replace "call/jmp *foo@GOTPCREL(%rip)" with
"call/jmp *foo@GOTRELAX(%rip)". As an option, we apply
-fno-plt to both PIC and non-PIC codes, if foo is externally defined.
It will save one indirect branch if GCC is right. If GCC is wrong
and foo is defined locally, we get a nop prefix/suffix. We have
nothing to lose.
--
H.J.
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