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IABSD.fr/xenocara/lib/mesa/src/intel/genxml/README
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This provides some background the design of the generated headers. We started out trying to generate bit fields but it evolved into the pack functions because of a few limitations: 1) Bit fields still generate terrible code today. Even with modern optimizing compilers you get multiple load+mask+store operations to the same dword in memory as you set individual bits. The compiler also has to generate code to mask out overflowing values (for example, if you assign 200 to a 2 bit field). Our driver never writes overflowing values so that's not needed. On the other hand, most compiler recognize that the template struct we use is a temporary variable and copy propagate the individual fields and do amazing constant folding. You should take a look at the code that gets generated when you compile in release mode with optimizations. 2) For some types we need to have overlapping bit fields. For example, some values are 64 byte aligned 32 bit offsets. The lower 5 bits of the offset are always zero, so the hw packs in a few misc bits in the lower 5 bits there. Other times a field can be either a u32 or a float. I tried to do this with overlapping anonymous unions and it became a big mess. Also, when using initializers, you can only initialize one union member so this just doesn't work with out approach. The pack functions on the other hand allows us a great deal of flexibility in how we combine things. In the case of overlapping fields (the u32 and float case), if we only set one of them in the pack function, the compiler will recognize that the other is initialized to 0 and optimize out the code to or it it. 3) Bit fields (and certainly overlapping anonymous unions of bit fields) aren't generally stable across compilers in how they're laid out and aligned. Our pack functions let us control exactly how things get packed, using only simple and unambiguous bitwise shifting and or'ing that works on any compiler. Once we have the pack function it allows us to hook in various transformations and validation as we go from template struct to dwords in memory: 1) Validation: As I said above, our driver isn't supposed to write overflowing values to the fields, but we've of course had lots of cases where we make mistakes and write overflowing values. With the pack function, we can actually assert on that and catch it at runtime. bitfields would just silently truncate. 2) Type conversions: some times it's just a matter of writing a float to a u32, but we also convert from bool to bits, from floats to fixed point integers. 3) Relocations: whenever we have a pointer from one buffer to another (for example a pointer from the meta data for a texture to the raw texture data), we have to tell the kernel about it so it can adjust the pointer to point to the final location. That means extra work we have to do extra work to record and annotate the dword location that holds the pointer. With bit fields, we'd have to call a function to do this, but with the pack function we generate code in the pack function to do this for us. That's a lot less error prone and less work. Keeping genxml files tidy : In order to spot differences easily between generations, we keep genxml files sorted. You can trigger the sort by running : $ cd src/intel/genxml; ./gen_sort_tags.py gen_sort_tags.py is the script that sorts genxml files using with the following rules : 1) Tags are grouped in the following order <enum>, <struct>, <instruction>, <register> 2) <field> tags are sorted through the value of their start attribute 3) Sort <struct> tags by dependency so that other scripts have everything properly ordered. As a convention, a genxml file name includes its version number multiplied by 10 (verx10).