[project @ 2000-01-24 17:24:23 by sewardj]

[project @ 2000-01-24 17:24:23 by sewardj]
Major reworking of the x86 floating point code generation.

Intel, in their infinite wisdom, selected a stack model for floating
point registers on x86.  That might have made sense back in 1979 --
nowadays we can see it for the nonsense it really is.  A stack model
fits poorly with the existing nativeGen infrastructure, which assumes
flat integer and FP register sets.  Prior to this commit, nativeGen
could not generate correct x86 FP code -- to do so would have meant
somehow working the register-stack paradigm into the register
allocator and spiller, which sounds very difficult.

We have decided to cheat, and go for a simple fix which requires no
infrastructure modifications, at the expense of generating ropey but
correct FP code.  All notions of the x86 FP stack and its insns have
been removed.  Instead, we pretend (to the instruction selector and
register allocator) that x86 has six floating point registers, %fake0
.. %fake5, which can be used in the usual flat manner.  We further
claim that x86 has floating point instructions very similar to SPARC
and Alpha, that is, a simple 3-operand register-register arrangement.
Code generation and register allocation proceed on this basis.

When we come to print out the final assembly, our convenient fiction
is converted to dismal reality.  Each fake instruction is
independently converted to a series of real x86 instructions.
%fake0 .. %fake5 are mapped to %st(0) .. %st(5).  To do reg-reg
arithmetic operations, the two operands are pushed onto the top of the
FP stack, the operation done, and the result copied back into the
relevant register.  There are only six %fake registers because 2 are
needed for the translation, and x86 has 8 in total.

The translation is inefficient but is simple and it works.  A cleverer
translation would handle a sequence of insns, simulating the FP stack
contents, would not impose a fixed mapping from %fake to %st regs, and
hopefully could avoid most of the redundant reg-reg moves of the
current translation.