20–24 Sept 2021
US/Pacific timezone

GCC support for the Darwin AArch64 ABI

22 Sept 2021, 08:00
15m
GNU Tools track/Virtual-Room (LPC Virtual)

GNU Tools track/Virtual-Room

LPC Virtual

150
GNU Tools Track GNU Tools Track

Speakers

Maxim Blinov (Embecosm) Andrew Burgess (Embecosm) Iain Sandoe

Description

This is a lightning talk.

One of the hurdles necessary to overcome for the M1 Darwin GCC port is
supporting the Darwin ABI specification. GCC is designed to process
argument passing the same way, regardless of whether the argument is
named or variadic. This however does not leave scope to accommodate the
Darwin modifications to the AArch64 ABI, which specifies that named
stack-allocated arguments are passed naturally aligned, but variadic
arguments are passed word-aligned.

To overcome this, we propose extending the GCC target hook API to carry
the additional information necessary to let the backend make its own
decisions about stack layout. The extension will not affect existing
targets, and is opt-in by nature.

The second issue we tackled was support for the GCC nested function
extensions to the C language. This is traditionally implemented using
trampolines injected onto the stack at runtime, which requires an
executable stack. Since Darwin's stack is not-executable, and the
target doesn't make use of function descriptors, we required a
solution to support nested function calls that didn't require changing
the ABI.

Our preliminary plan is to generate the trampolines into an mmaped
executable page: The trampolines will be generated when required
within a function, and deallocated when the control leaves the
enclosing scope.

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Primary authors

Maxim Blinov (Embecosm) Andrew Burgess (Embecosm) Iain Sandoe

Presentation materials

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