We are running a survey to help us improve the experience for all of our members. If you see the survey appear, please take the time to tell us about your experience if you can.
Please clarify that with me... With
"The current Program Counter (PC) cannot be referred to by number as if part ofthe general register file and therefore cannot be used as the source or destinationof arithmetic instructions, or as the base, index or transfer register of load andstore instructions."
in the programming guide what indirect branches, eg. a BTAC (Branch Target Address cache) of A53 is supposed to handle? I can think of only svc, hvc, smc, eret.
By removing instructions that refer directly to the PC a number of indirect branches got significantly reduced from ARMv7 to ARMv8.
Thanks!
Marek
I guess that br, blr are also indirect branches as the address to branch cannot be computed at the compile time.
SVC/HVC/SMC are special cases, as they generate exceptions. More "regular" indirect branches in A64 are BR, BLR and RET.