v8.1M's "low-overhead-loop" extension has three instructions
for looping:
* DLS (start of a do-loop)
* WLS (start of a while-loop)
* LE (end of a loop)
The loop-start instructions are both simple operations to start a
loop whose iteration count (if any) is in LR. The loop-end
instruction handles "decrement iteration count and jump back to loop
start"; it also caches the information about the branch back to the
start of the loop to improve performance of the branch on subsequent
iterations.
As with the branch-future instructions, the architecture permits an
implementation to discard the LO_BRANCH_INFO cache at any time, and
QEMU takes the IMPDEF option to never set it in the first place
(equivalent to discarding it immediately), because for us a "real"
implementation would be unnecessary complexity.
(This implementation only provides the simple looping constructs; the
vector extension MVE (Helium) adds some extra variants to handle
looping across vectors. We'll add those later when we implement
MVE.)
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
Message-id: 20201019151301.2046-8-peter.maydell@linaro.org
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