Re: AltiVec register ptrace support

[Jason R Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 12:52:33PM -0600, Kumar Gala wrote:

 > Is there any reason that we can not spport both methods.  There are
 > applications in which having the ability to get all the registers is a
 > single syscall is a major performance improvement.

I'll chime in...

Other systems that support ptrace(2) don't have PEEK/POKE/READ_U/WRITE_U
methods.

I'm currently working on AltiVec for NetBSD/powerpc, and ptrace(2) interface
for AltiVec is going to look like:

	PT_GETALTIVECREGS
	PT_SETALTIVECREGS

...both of which using the following structure as an argument:

	struct vreg {
		uint32_t vreg[32][4];	/* vector register contents */
		register_t vscr;	/* vector status and control reg */
		register_t vrsave;	/* SPR 238 */
	};

This is consistent with how e.g. SSE/SSE2 registers are handled on
NetBSD/i386 (PT_GETXMMREGS/PT_SETXMMREGS).

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>