RFC: generic vector unit support?

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 04:20:14PM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote:
> I am not sure about what to do about ptrace.  We extended the interface
> to have two new request types (PTRACE_GETVRREGS, PTRACE_SETVRREGS)
> which return the full altivec state (all registers, vscr, vrsave).  We
> could overload these request types to return all the 'vector' state
> depending on which processor we are.  This would mean debuggers would
> have to know which processor we are to know how big of a buffer to have
> for ptrace calls, the memory layout, etc.

I'd rather see you do it the other way around:  Add PTRACE_GETSPEREGS
in the e500, so that the debugger can use ptrace to figure out which
registers are available.

> We also extend generic vector idea to allow dumping of altivec/SPE
> register state into core files (which we do not do currently).

That's a great idea.  Again, I think Altivec and SPE registers should
be tagged differently even though they can't coexist.

Otherwise, it sounds like a good idea to me.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer

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