[webkit-dev] SH4, MIPS, and legacy-ARM assemblers in JavaScriptCore

[Gergely Kis]

Hi All,

We are working on updating WebKit MIPS support. In particular we have a
work in progress LLINT and DFG implementation for MIPS.

We already have results (mozilla testsuite, sunspider and v8 benchmarks run
reasonably well), but there are still some bugs that need to be fixed
before we can submit this work.

Regarding https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79040, feel free to
contact us if you need help with the MIPS specific bits.

Regarding the MIPS buildbots: I will check internally if we can host a MIPS
build slave (possibly including different boards) for the webkit project,
and get back to you.

Best Regards,
Gergely

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Osztrogonac Csaba <oszi at inf.u-szeged.hu>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'd like to inquire about the future of MIPS and SH4 assemblers.
>
> A long time ago we had buildbots for MIPS and SH4 platforms (hosted by
> Holger).
> But their last builds were at 29th June, machine were stopped, bots were
> removed
> from build.webkit.org (2 months before!).  Is there anyone interested in
> maintaining
> MIPS and SH4 buildbots (and probably EWS bots) to catch build failures
> early?
>
> Gábor is working on fixing https://bugs.webkit.org/show_**bug.cgi?id=79040<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79040>and it
> seems the fix will affect all assemblers. But I don't think if it is a
> good idea
> to try to fix MIPS and SH4 assemblers blindly without EWS and buildbots.
> And who
> knows if MIPS and SH4 builds work now or not?
>
> br,
> Ossy
>
> Filip Pizlo írta:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We are actively trying to improve the WebKit JavaScript engine
>> (JavaScriptCore), with new debugging, profiling, memory efficiency, and
>> performance features.  Because JavaScriptCore is a JIT-based engine, this
>> inevitably means doing JIT work, which in turn includes adding new
>> instructions to the JIT assemblers and changing the API between the
>> assemblers and the JIT.
>>
>> Currently, the maintenance situation in the assembler layer is not great.
>>  We have three well-supported assemblers, X86-32, X86-64, and ARMv7. Then
>> we have three assemblers that appear to be on life support: legacy
>> (non-THUMB2, pre-v7) ARM, SH4, and MIPS.  It is increasingly painful to
>> maintain these three barely-supported assemblers.  None of these assemblers
>> has been updated to support the new JIT or interpreter infrastructure, and
>> there appears to be no ongoing effort to do so.  That means that for
>> progress to be made on X86 and ARMv7, we need to increasingly scatter #if
>> ENABLE(...) noise throughout the system to keep those other assemblers
>> building.  Neither the active JavaScriptCore contributors, nor those
>> running the bots for those hardware platforms, appear to have much interest
>> in maintaining those assemblers, other than the occasional build fix.
>>
>> This is not a good situation to be in.
>>
>> So, I am curious: is anyone shipping with the legacy ARM assembler, the
>> MIPS assembler, or the SH4 assembler?
>>
>> As a secondary question, if you are shipping the legacy ARM assembler,
>> are you doing so because you have legacy ARM hardware or because you have
>> not had the chance to switch to the new ARM assembler in your codebase?
>>
>> -Filip
>>
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