On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 09:07:26PM +0200, Kevin D. Kissell wrote: > I don't remember the discussion in question, but it's a question > which comes up from time to time, due to the existence of > MIPS-like CPUs which lack the (patented) lwl/lwr mechanism > for dealing with unaligned data. The Lexra cores, for example. > > There's really no such thing as "disabling" lwl/lwr. They are part > of the base MIPS instruction set. If one wants to live without them, > one can either rig a compiler to emit multi-instruction sequences instead > of lwr/lwl to do the appropriate shifts and masks (which is slower on all > targets), or you can rig the OS to emulate them, and hope that the processors > lacking support will take clean reserved instruction traps, where the function > can be emulated (which is "free" for code running on CPUs with lwl/lwr, > but *really* slow for the guys doing emulation). Technically you're right ... In reality lwl/lwr are covered by US patent 4,814,976 which would also cover a software implementation. So unless MIPS grants a license for the purpose of emulation in the Linux kernel ... Ralf
