> It would be better to break it up as patches each of > which adds support for a coherent bite-sized subset of > these instructions (so each individual patch includes > the helper function declaration, implementation and > translate.c changes for a smaller number of instructions).
I am reading MIPS ASE DSP manual [1]. I think you can group those instructions as "Chapter 4. MIPS DSP ASE Instruction Summary" does. So you might have following patches, [1/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Arithmetic Sub-class (~50 ins) [2/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - GPR-Based Shift Sub-class (~22 ins) [3/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Multiply Sub-class (~38 ins) [4/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Bit/ Manipulation Sub-class (~6 ins) [5/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Compare-Pick Sub-class (~18 ins) [6/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Accumulator and DSPControl Access Sub-class (~21 ins) [7/] MIPS ASE DSP Support - Indexed-Load and Branch Sub-class (4 ins) [8/] MIPS ASE DSP Testcase You can combine smaller subsets into a bigger one to make each patch equally sized. Each patch adding MIPS ASE DSP support should be self-contained, which means you can apply (and compile) them one-by-one, no error occured. I think testcase for all ASE DSP instructions can be just one patch. Regards, chenwj [1] MIPS32® Architecture for Programmers VolumeIV-e: The MIPS® DSP Application-Specific Extension to the MIPS32®Architecture http://www.mips.com/products/product-materials/processor/mips-architecture/ -- Wei-Ren Chen (陳韋任) Computer Systems Lab, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (R.O.C.) Tel:886-2-2788-3799 #1667 Homepage: http://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~chenwj