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GNU Assembler Start of Function & basic block

Balaji V. Iyer bviyer@ncsu.edu
Tue Jan 1 06:10:00 GMT 2008 
Dear Ramana,
	Thank you very much for your response. I am doing it through
assembler because I want to put specalized control instructions that I
have created to explain the register usage to the processor. These
instructions give information about register usage and liveness
information to the processor. 
	Now, can these specialized instructions be conveyed in the
machien description of GCC? I have looked through the MD documentation
in the internals document and I hvae not found a way to do so.   
	I have noticed that in the assembly passed into the assembler
from GCC, every basic block start is starting with a label. Does it do
anything special (like set a variable or something like that) to
indicate that it has seen a label? Also, any machine dependent function
that can I call during this phase? Also, does it do something like this
in the beginning of a function (since it is sort of a basic block start
in itself)

Thank you very much in advance for all your help...

Yours Sincerely,

Balaji V. Iyer.

-- 
 
Balaji V. Iyer
PhD Student, 
Center for Efficient, Scalable and Reliable Computing,
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
North Carolina State University.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ramana Radhakrishnan [mailto:ramana.r@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 12:47 AM
To: Balaji V. Iyer
Cc: binutils@sourceware.org
Subject: Re: GNU Assembler Start of Function & basic block

Hi,


On Jan 1, 2008 3:35 AM, Balaji V. Iyer <bviyer@ncsu.edu> wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>        I have a question regarding GNU Assembler.
>
> I am currently working with the OpenRISC port of GNU Binutils 
> (2.11.92) and I am making some modifications to the ISA. I want to 
> insert special instructions at the beginning and end of each basic 
> block AND another set of special instructions at the beginning and end

> of function (I tried to do it in GCC and I was unsuccessful in 
> representing these instructions in the machine description).

I don't think the assembler can help you figure out the basic blocks by
default. You would have to write code to detect basic blocks and then
add these instructions.  I'd suggest you use GCC for such
instrumentation.

For functions its easy - you have to modify your expand_{pro/epi}logue
functions for doing this if you have RTL based prologue and epilogues
based on command line switches.

For basic blocks you might choose to look at the coverage options to
figure this out (fprofile-arcs and their friends).Or you could write a
pass that was in cfglayout mode to insert these special instructions.
Anyways this discussion is more relevant to the GCC list , so you could
continue it there.

HTH,

cheers
Ramana

>
> I looked through the GNU Assembler Internals manual and I couldn't 
> find any specialized functions that can be used to access the start 
> and end of each basic block OR function-call (I may have missed
something...).
> Can someone please point me in the right direction?
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Yours Sincerely,
>
> Balaji V. Iyer.
>
> --
>
> Balaji V. Iyer
> PhD Student,
> Center for Efficient, Scalable and Reliable Computing, Department of 
> Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University.
>
>



--
Ramana Radhakrishnan
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