[Caml-list] ARM code generator problem

[Jeffrey Scofield <jeffsco@psellos.com>]

Greetings,

While working on porting OCaml 4.00.0 to iOS, I ran across
what looks like a problem in the ARM code generation.

If you look at asmcomp/arm/emit.mlp you see lots of places where
s14 is used as a scratch register.  The one that showed up in my
code is the code sequence for float_of_int:

    | Lop(Ifloatofint) ->
        `       fmsr    s14, {emit_reg i.arg.(0)}\n`;
        `       fsitod  {emit_reg i.res.(0)}, s14\n`; 2

Note that the emitted code always uses s14 (unconditionally).  This
suggests that s14 should be set aside as a scratch register.

However, s14 is also an alias for the low order part of d7.  If you look
at asmcomp/arm/proc.ml you'll see that d7 is used as a general purpose
register.

The result is that a value in d7 is sometimes destroyed by a use
of s14 as a scratch register.  In my code it was a call to float_of_int
that destroyed a float value being kept in d7.

I'm wondering if there's any wisdom on the list about this problem.
I don't see anything about it on Mantis.

For my own project, I think I can solve this simply by leaving d7 out of
the list of general registers in proc.ml.  However, this might be a bit
drastic.  Maybe there is a more subtle and wise solution.

You can read about OCaml4-on-iOS progress in my sporadic blog:

    http://psellos.com/2012/07/2012.07.ocamlxarm-ocaml4-1.html

I can provide my OCaml code and the generated ARM code if it will help
show the problem.  I haven't (yet) tried to whittle it down to a small
case.

Regards,

Jeffrey