[Qemu-devel] QEMU fails with different levels of compiler optimization

[André Braga]

First and foremost, I'd like to congratulate Fabrice Bellard and
everyone involved on this project. I've never been so excited with an
opensource emulation project like this, so I decided I just *had* to
jump in :)

Following other's experiments, I tried to build QEMU with different
compiler switches to see if I could get a more optimized binary. I'm
doing this build on mingw on a XP host now, but I have access to
Linux, FreeBSD on the Intel side and Mac OS X on the Apple side (a 1st
generation iMac, not a speed demon), and I might be able to fiddle
with a PA-RISC64 HP-UX machine.

Anyway.  So far, my goal is to produce a working binary with those switches:

CFLAGS=-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse
-finline-functions -funroll-loops -O2 -s

which are the same I used to build SDL (ASM blitters, 1.2.7. Had to
fix a few declarations on SDL_yuv_mmx.c because they totally forgot
about NASM, it seems).

(I'm not doing -O3 by itself because of register constraints on the
x86, and the -s switch is superfluous, but I like to spare my time and
not run strip every other build. Besides, code that fits the cache is
nice. :))


With these switches, I can *almost* build a working binary. After
manually compiling helper.c changing the flags to "-march=pentium-mmx
-mmmx -finline-functions -funroll-loops -O2 -s" , I can actually load
a knoppix-based image up to the graphical LILO loader. As it gets to
loading the kernel, it fails with exception code  0xC000001E, which is
"STATUS_INVALID_LOCK_SEQUENCE". It might be something with the loop
unrolling or the inlining of functions, but I'd like to have more
guidance on where/how to debug it. I have GDB available but I have no
clue on how to use it in a meaningful way to this project (as I always
steptrace my own programs...).

BTW, the build works flawlessly if I run everything with

CFLAGS=-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse
-finline-functions -funroll-loops -O2 -s

but only

HELPER_CFLAGS=-Wall -fno-strict-aliasing -O2 -s -fomit-frame-pointer

And surely enough, I hand-editted the makefiles, since they don't seem
to respect my environment... Maybe because CFLAGS is set again and not
re-declared as

CFLAGS?=blah
?

Sice there was already a bug found on GCC exactly on this helper.c
file, I'll not be surprised if this is but another bug, but I'd give
they a little more credit than that and come to this list first.

I might try to build it again with the flags I wanted first and trace
the execution up to the point where it fails, but, still, I'd
appreciate some instructions.

GCC reports itself as 'gcc version 3.2.3 (mingw special 20030504-1)'.
It's the stock one found on mingw site.

I'm running the latest CVS sources, also.


Thanks a lot!
André


PS: I tried to build it with the prerelease GCC3.4 mingw build by
bitWalk (found on http://www63.tok2.com/home/bitwalk/download.html),
but neither SDL nor QEMU build correctly on their toolchain (so I'd
chalk it up to compiler bugs and/or conflicting versions of the
toolchain). I also tried the thisiscool-gcc 3.5 build
(www.thisiscool.com/gcc_mingw.htm), and again it failed. I haven't
tried the thisiscool-gcc 3.4 toolchain yet.

PPS: Nework ain't working, but this seems to be a common problem under
XP host, right? I can ping the host's address, but nothing else works
(no DNS, no CIFS). And sound is also not working, but I haven't yet
applied the patches found on http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/ , so
this might be expected.


-- 
"Structure is nothing if it is all you've got. Skeletons spook people
if they try to walk around on their own; I really wonder why XML does
not"
-Erik Naggum