On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 00:00 +0200, Anders Johansson wrote:
PAE stands for Physical Address Extension, not "processor"
Brain fart.
I'll let someone who knows more about x86 assembly comment on the rest, I've
tried my best to stay away from that mess
It has _nothing_ to do with assembler.
In fact, one thing I constantly run into is the fact that assembler
teachings you _nothing_ about modern microprocessor design. It only
teaches you about _basic_ system-level organization, and really _no_
better than C these days.
In fact, C compilers targets often build much better code for today's
superscalar and/or RISC architectures than an assembler coder can.
Unless you have years of layout-level exposure to the design of the
superscalar and/or RISC itself, you can't outsmart the engineers that
wrote the C compiler target. About the only time people write assembler
is for either bootloaders or to in-line assembler in C code -- and that
code is almost _always_ simple/basic code from the optimization section
of the microprocessors programmer manual.
Microprocessors are designed by physicists and EEs these days, and no
longer computer science or programming majors that introduced the
original instruction sets of the first integrated circuits in the '70s.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why Intel's EPIC was a total failure,
performance wise, just as Digital Semi said it would be. One can't
understand (let alone optimize) anything about the microprocessor at the
instruction set. Instruction sets -- including concepts such as the
Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) -- are not where the industry is
moving towards, long story.
</anal-EE-mode>
"ABI of the unlinked as well as linked object code"??
Clarity is the child of understanding.
Yeah, I know. Sorry, I didn't sleep last night. Worked on documenting
the systems/network for a new client I just started working with
Saturday. Ugh, total UNIX/Linux network mess (largely the doing of the
previous sysadmin long gone).
--
Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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