> +#undef TARGET_PASS_BY_REFERENCE
> +#define TARGET_PASS_BY_REFERENCE bpf_pass_by_reference
I might have misunderstood, but I thought from an earlier (IRC?)
message, it wasn't possible for the callee to access the caller's
frame, which was why you had the error about running out of argument
registers. If so, won't passing by reference make the argument
inaccessible in practice? I don't see what you gain by defining
the hook, since I'd have assumed (at least after the fix above)
that it would be better to pass by value and get an error about
having no argument registers left.
Yes. I added that hook before I had the restriction of number of
arguments in place. Removing it.
Happy auto correction :)
A colleague (who actually _uses_ eBPF extensively, ahem) tells me that
the kernel verifier allows to pass addresses of the caller's stack
frame, tracking that it is a ptr to a stack location, and it knows which
stack it came from. So it is indeed possible for the callee to access
the caller's frame, and therefore to pass arguments by reference.
On the downside, it is not possible for a callee to access the caller's
frame applying an offset to its frame pointer, because the stacks are
disjoint. This means that most probably I will have to dedicate a real,
not eliminable register to act as the arg pointer, if I want to get rid
of the annoying limitation on the number of arguments... and in order
to keep ABI compatibility with llvm built objects, this register is
gonna have to be %r5, i.e. the last register usable to pass arguments,
but it should be only used for that purpose if the function gets more
than 5 arguments... sounds messy, but there is hope, yay!
However, unless someone comes with a magical macro to define or an
existing target doing the same thing, I am deferring attacking this
problem for later (TM) and for the time being I will keep both the
ability of passing aggregates and other big arguments by reference, and
the limit on number of arguments (this is what clang does.)
I hope that's ok for you people.
Salud!
