Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-arm] [PATCH v2 18/23] target/arm: Move CPU state dumping routines to helper.c

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2019 at 15:41, Alex Bennée <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hmm so helper is a mix of non-TCG and TCG bits whereas helper-a64.c is
> basically just TCG helpers. It makes me wonder if we are breaking a
> convention here as helper.c is traditionally only TCG helpers.

The original convention was:
 * op_helper.c has functions which need access to things which
   TCG puts in specific registers and which are accessed from
   C via gcc "register variables" (most notably the CPU env pointer)
 * helper.c has functions which don't need access to the register
   variables (a mishmash of stuff, usually including interrupt/exception
   handling)
 * some targets further split out some parts of the C code into other
   foo-helper.c files
This distinction became entirely moot when we reworked the TCG code
to no longer use register variables (but instead pass in the env
pointer and so on directly as a function argument). You can still
see the comments at the top of target/i386/{op_helper,helper}.c that
claim this is what the files are for, though :-)

So these days there is really no fixed convention, except that
when we've added new things we've sometimes put them in their
own .c file. helper-a64.c in particular is on its own because it's
code that's only compiled into aarch64-softmmu, not arm-softmmu.

> It feels like there should be different file that is unambiguously used
> for both TCG and KVM based workloads where things like the cpu dump code
> can live.

Some sort of split like this seems like a good idea. I don't
know if any of the other target archs have already got a
good convention/naming scheme we could copy?

thanks
-- PMM