Ram initialization and small c.

[Eric W. Biederman]

Jeremy Jackson <jerj at coplanar.net> writes:

> Another idea on the subject:
> 
> On some chipsets, the entire range of supported processors have MMX and
> maybe SSE/SSE2.  MMX gives 8 extra 64 bit registers (nobody uses
> floating-point in LinuxBIOS, right?) that can be used as 32bit.  They
> can't be used as address/index/base, but only for data. See the MOVD
> instruction.
> 
> Newer versions of gcc offer to produce code which uses them with -mmmx,
> -m3dnow, or at least inline asm can use the registers.  Might be nice
> for checksums with the vector instructions also.

Nice I had missed the fact that you can use MOVD with MMX registers.
I have used it just a little bit when debugging to access the SSE
registers but I didn't need them in production so they did not
get used.

I think this is almost justification enough to write a new compiler.
16 extra 32 bit registers that you can use for scratch values on modern
cpus.  And 8 extra registers on the older cpus.

And using them can be a compile option so the code does not get polluted
with strange assumptions.

I won't support those in the very first pass but that is definitely where
I am going to work on as soon as I can produce code.

Can you see a way to stuff more than 32bit in there? 

Eric