This avoids the requirement of putting the code image in a
section/segment which is both writable and executable, which is good
for security and avoids trouble with systems like iOS which disallow
such things.
The implementation relies on relative addressing such that the offset
of the desired address is fixed as a compile-time constant relative to
the start of the memory area of interest (e.g. the code image, heap
image, or thunk table). At runtime, the base pointer to the memory
area is retrieved from the thread structure and added to the offset to
compute the final address. Using the thread pointer allows us to
generate read-only, position-independent code while avoiding the use
of IP-relative addressing, which is not available on all
architectures.
This monster commit is the first step towards supporting
cross-architecture bootimage builds. The challenge is to build a heap
and code image for the target platform where the word size and
endianess may differ from those of the build architecture. That means
the memory layout of objects may differ due to alignment and size
differences, so we can't just copy objects into the heap image
unchanged; we must copy field by field, resizing values, reversing
endianess and shifting offsets as necessary.
This commit also removes POD (plain old data) type support from the
type generator because it added a lot of complication and little
value.
Due to encoding limitations, the immediate operand of conditional
branches can be no more than 32KB forward or backward. Since the
JIT-compiled form of some methods can be larger than 32KB, and we also
do conditional jumps to code outside the current method in some cases,
we must work around this limitation.
The strategy of this commit is to provide inline, intermediate jump
tables where necessary. A given conditional branch whose target is
too far for a direct jump will instead point to an unconditional
branch in the nearest jump table which points to the actual target.
Unconditional immediate branches are also limited on PowerPC, but this
limit is 32MB, which is not an impediment in practice. If it does
become a problem, we'll need to encode such branches using multiple
instructions.
On PowerPC and ARM, we can't rely on the return address having already
been saved on the stack on entry to a thunk, so we must look for it in
the link register instead.
We can't rely on the C++ compiler to save the return address in a
known location on entry to each function we might call from Java
(although GCC 4.5 seems to do so consistently, which is why I hadn't
realized the unwinding code was relying on that assumption), so we
must store it explicitly in MyThread::ip in each thunk. For PowerPC
and x86, we continue saving it on the stack as always, since the
calling convention guarantees its location relative to the stack
pointer.
This fixes the tails=true build (at least for x86_64) and eliminates
the need for a frame table in the tails=false build. In the
tails=true build, we still need a frame table on x86(_64) to help
determine whether we've caught a thread executing code to do a tail
call or pop arguments off the stack. However, I've not yet written
the code to actually use this table, and it is only needed to handle
asynchronous unwinds via Thread.getStackTrace.
Previously, we unwound the stack by following the chain of frame
pointers for normal returns, stack trace creation, and exception
unwinding. On x86, this required reserving EBP/RBP for frame pointer
duties, making it unavailable for general computation and requiring
that it be explicitly saved and restored on entry and exit,
respectively.
On PowerPC, we use an ABI that makes the stack pointer double as a
frame pointer, so it doesn't cost us anything. We've been using the
same convention on ARM, but it doesn't match the native calling
convention, which makes it unusable when we want to call native code
from Java and pass arguments on the stack.
So far, the ARM calling convention mismatch hasn't been an issue
because we've never passed more arguments from Java to native code
than would fit in registers. However, we must now pass an extra
argument (the thread pointer) to e.g. divideLong so it can throw an
exception on divide by zero, which means the last argument must be
passed on the stack. This will clobber the linkage area we've been
using to hold the frame pointer, so we need to stop using it.
One solution would be to use the same convention on ARM as we do on
x86, but this would introduce the same overhead of making a register
unavailable for general use and extra code at method entry and exit.
Instead, this commit removes the need for a frame pointer. Unwinding
involves consulting a map of instruction offsets to frame sizes which
is generated at compile time. This is necessary because stack trace
creation can happen at any time due to Thread.getStackTrace being
called by another thread, and the frame size varies during the
execution of a method.
So far, only x86(_64) is working, and continuations and tail call
optimization are probably broken. More to come.
We have to be careful about how we calculate return addresses on ARM
due to padding introduced by constant pools interspersed with code.
When calculating the offset of code where we're inserting a constant
pool, we want the offset of the end of the pool for jump targets, but
we want the offset just prior to the beginning of the pool (i.e. the
offset of the instruction responsible for jumping past the pool) when
calculating a return address.
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 allows the assembler to see the operand types of the comparison
and the condition for jumping in the same operation, which is
essential for generating efficient code in cases such as
multiple-precision compare-and-branch.
We now use SingleRead::successor in pickTarget, where we use it to
determine the prefered target site for the successor without requiring
the target to conform to that preference. The previous code made the
preference a hard requirement, which is not desirable or even possible
in general.
We now create a unique thunk for each vtable position so as to avoid
relying on using the return address to determine what method is to be
compiled and invoked, since we will not have the correct return address
in the case of a tail call. This required refactoring how executable
memory is allocated in order to keep AOT compilation working. Also, we
must always use the same register to hold the class pointer when
compiling virtual calls, and ensure that the pointer stays there until
the call instruction is executed so we know where to find it in the
thunk.
This is important on the 32-bit OS X PowerPC ABI, since the location
of the low 32-bits of a return value change depending on whether the
entire value is 64-bits or not.
