> > > > 4) The voice for doing any instruction emulation in kernel - it is not a > > MIPS business model to force customer to put details of all Coprocessor 2 > > instructions public. We provide an interface and the rest is a customer > > business. Besides that it is really painful to make a differentiation > > between Cavium Octeon and some another CPU instructions with the same > > opcode. On other side, leaving emulation of their instructions to them is > > not a wise after having some good way doing that multiple years. > > IMO this is all backwards. If MIPS customers put proprietary > instructions into their ISA, they leave out the FPU, and they put a > proprietary insn in a branch delay slot, then I think that they > deserve a fatal signal. > > There's a really easy solution for new systems: fix the toolchain. > Teach the assembler to disallow any proprietary instructions in an FP > branch delay slot. I think I'd be mostly in favour of this from a toolchain perspective but only from the perspective of FP branch instructions. This still leaves a problem for normal branches should any of them get removed and need emulating. The general form of bltzal and bgezal would be the example here of branches which are removed in R6 (The special case of using $0 remains). This is really niche but my point is more about how we would deal with such a thing if it happened. The answer may be just to scream and shout and discourage the removal of such instructions from the architecture. Matthew
