Extends the desciptor-based indirect call support for 32-bit codegen, and enables indirect calls for AIX.
In-depth Description:
In a function descriptor based ABI, a function pointer points at a descriptor structure as opposed to the function's entry point. The
descriptor takes the form of 3 pointers: 1 for the function's entry point, 1 for the TOC anchor of the module containing the function
definition, and 1 for the environment pointer.
struct FunctionDescriptor { void *EntryPoint; void *TOCAnchor; void *EnvironmentPointer; };
An indirect call has several steps of loading the the information from the descriptor into the proper registers for setting up the call. Namely it has to:
- Save the caller's TOC pointer into the TOC save slot in the linkage area, and then load the callee's TOC pointer into the TOC register (GPR 2 on AIX).
- Load the function descriptor's entry point into the count register.
- Load the environment pointer into the environment pointer register (GPR 11 on AIX).
- Perform the call by branching on count register.
- Restore the caller's TOC pointer after returning from the indirect call.
A couple important caveats to the above:
- There is no way to directly load a value from memory into the count register. Instead we populate the count register by loading the entry point address into a gpr and then moving the gpr to the count register.
- The TOC restore has to come immediately after the branch on count register instruction (i.e., the 1st instruction executed after we return from the call). This is an implementation limitation. We could, in theory, schedule the restore elsewhere as long as no uses of the TOC pointer fall in between the call and the restore; however, to keep it simple, we insert a pseudo instruction that represents both the indirect branch instruction and the load instruction that restores the caller's TOC from the linkage area. As they flow through the compiler as a single pseudo instruction, nothing can be inserted between them and the caller's TOC is then valid at any use.
Nit: Add "is" before "not" here and on the next change.