[Pnet-developers] Generic unroller for Portable.NET

[Rhys Weatherley]

I got some time this week to work on the generic unroller again.  The x86 
version works well with only a few instructions left to add.  The ARM version 
has a couple of bugs that should be resolved in the next day or two.

To recap, the generic unroller centralises the bulk of the code generation 
tasks, with just a few simple files to define platform-specific behaviours.  
This should make it a lot easier to port to other platforms such as PPC, 
IA-64, Alpha, S/390, etc.  Volunteers wanted!  It would be nice if we could 
another platform or two before DotGNU 0.1.

The main code for the generic unroller is in pnet/engine/unroll.c, 
pnet/engine/unroll_arith.c, pnet/engine/unroll_const.c, etc.  To enable it, 
you will need to modify pnet/engine/Makefile.am to remove "unroll_x86.c" and 
"unroll_arm.c", and to add "unroll.c", "md_x86.c", and "md_arm.c".  I will 
make this the active unroller once the above bugs have been dealt with.  The 
"unroll_x86*.c" and "unroll_arm*.c" files can be considered obsolete now.

See the file "pnet/doc/unrolling.txt" for instructions on how to port the 
generic unroller to new platforms.

Cheers,

Rhys.