Previously, loading an arbitrary 32-bit constant required up to four
instructions (128 bytes), since we did so one byte at a time via
immediate-mode operations.
The preferred way to load constants on ARM is via PC-relative
addressing, but this is challenging because immediate memory offsets
are limited to 4096 bytes in either direction. We frequently need to
compile methods which are larger than 4096, or even 8192, bytes, so we
must intersperse code and data if we want to use PC-relative loads
everywhere.
This commit enables pervasive PC-relative loads by handling the
following cases:
1. Method is shorter than 4096 bytes: append data table to end
2. Method is longer than 4096 bytes, but no basic block is longer
than 4096 bytes: insert data tables as necessary after blocks, taking
care to minimize the total number of tables
3. Method is longer than 4096 bytes, and some blocks are longer than
4096 bytes: split large basic blocks and insert data tables as above
This requires adding LinkRegister to the list of reserved registers,
since it must be preserved in the thunk code generated by
compileDirectInvoke. An alternative would be to explicitly preserve
it in that special case, but that would complicate the code quite a
bit.
Due to a silly cut-and-paste error, we were incorrectly passing the
stdout and stderr file descriptors back from native code to Java,
which prevented reading the output of the child process.
We were incorrectly returning an empty array when the input was empty,
whereas we ought to return an array containing a single empty string.
When the pattern to match was empty, we went into a loop to create an
infinite list of empty strings, only to crash once we've run out of
memory. This commit addresses both problems.
We've been getting away with not doing this so far since our Java
calling convention matches the native calling convention concerning
where the return address is saved, so when our thunk calls native code
it gets saved for us automatically. However, there was still the
danger that a thread would interrupt another thread after the stack
pointer was saved to the thread field but before the native code was
called and try to get a stack trace, at which point it would try to
find the return address relative to that stack pointer and find
garbage instead. This commit ensures that we save the return address
before saving the stack pointer to avoid such a situation.
