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by cperciva 2925 days ago
Hmm, I thought most RISCy CPUs kept FP values in GP registers?
1 comments

No, I can't think of an arch that does that. Power, SH, Mips, Sparc, Alpha, ARM, and RISC-V all have separate architectural register files for the floating point state.

Some ARM ABIs end up passing floats in integer registers, but that's just for compatibility for code that doesn't assume the presence of an FPU and might be doing everything soft float.

Hmm, ok. It's a long time since I've looked at that. Come to think of it, I think it might be 20 years since I opened CA:QA...
Yeah I’d say that modern OoO Arm implementations (A57, A72, ...) are worth trying to speculate into trapped VFP state. Lazy FPU is definitly a thing everywhere.

My hunch says that chips affected by 4a could easily be fair game (4a is speculating reads into priviledged regs... I wonder if 4a would work on regs that are trapped, not inconceivable)