Re: Mach-O binary format support and Darwin syscall personality[Was: uts banner changes]

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Tue Dec 12 2006 - 17:22:00 EST



> The PPC syscall stuff on the other hand is fairly straightforward.
> The code loads the argument registers (which I _think_ follow the
> same syscall ABI on Linux and Darwin due to somebody having a flash
> of inspiration and putting that recommendation in the PPC spec
> documents)

I wouldn't bet on that ... they might look the same but it's likely that
there will be subtle differences. There are definitely differences
between the PEF ABI used on MacOS < X (and useable in OS X with a
special loader) and the SysV ABI we use in Linux. The differences
generally are around those areas:

- stack frame format (hopefully should be irrelevant for syscalls,
well, I hope so ...)
- va_args format (same)
- passing or returning function arguments larger than the native int
size (passing 64 bits values, passing structures by values) (r3/r4 vs.
stack for example).
- TOC/TLS/whatever is in r2, r12 and r13 ...

I would expect most of these but not all to be irrelevant for syscalls.

Now, I don't know precisely what the mach-o ABI looks like, we might be
lucky and it may be similar to ours. PEF is not, but then, PEF isn't
native in OS-X, they use a special loader/wrapper for it.

Also, beware that there are two different ABIs (both in linux and in
mach-o) for 32 and 64 bits binaries.

Ben.


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