[Libre-soc-dev] svp64

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl at lkcl.net
Sat Dec 19 00:59:24 GMT 2020


https://libre-soc.org/openpower/sv/sprs/

found the relevant section and cut/pasted it.

it's not just MVL and VL that need to go into the SPR, it's the srcoffs
(and for twin pred the destoffs) as well.

so that was why 32 bits is needed.  storing the srcoffs, destoffs and
subvloffs which are the indices of the current loop for i in range(VL) is
what allows re-entrancy and hugely reduces latency as well as not messing
with LDST if there are pagefaults.

basically srcoffs destoffs subvloffs are all parts of the *Program Counter*
and need to be respected and treated as such.

by a jammy fluke you can see there are 4 bits spare.  it is not
unreasonable to reserve these to extend to 0 to 64 but if trying to go to
128 or 256 that is not going to fit into 32 bits.  just bear that in mind.
 it will need an extra SPR.

32 bits because it starts to get quite a lot, one for user space one for
supervisor one for hypervisor.  remember this is an extension of the PC so
have to take care.

construction of immediate constants into 32 bits is 3 instructions.  64
bits requires 6. to be avoided.

also the Twin Pred SUBVL concept whilst a good one (redundant as it turns
out) would require an extra 2 bits for a destsubvloffs and you can see if
we expand VL to 7 bit it is not going to fit.

l.


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