Re: MMX registers on x86?

Stan Shebs
1999-04-14T17:59:00Z

From: "Daniel Berlin" <dberlin@msn.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 19:40:26 -0400

However, it might be better to just add some mechanism to define "special"
registers (Fer instance, ,3dnow/KNI/MMX) that are in some way different from
the rest of the processor registers, be it in size/usage/whatever.
I'm about to add KNI support to the BeOS port, as well as MMX and 3DNow
support, and i'd rather have some standard supported way of doing it than
making another hack that someone will have to futz with and learn the
reasoning behind a year or two down the line. Or when something like
Altivec comes along, it wouldn't take major retrofitting and port hacking
(every single target that can run on that processor with a different -nat
file) to do.

Andrew Cagney has been working on some infrastructure that will, among
other things, greatly simplify handling of special registers and
multiple register sets. He's supposed to send a long detailed message
to this list in a few days. We're hoping to roll the code out into the
sources this month, give people a crack at it.

Stan