In our first post, I summarized the work of a few evenings of heat and a few hours on a train, being basically the boilerplate (parenthesis-infested boilerplate, but boilerplate nonetheless) necessary to get an SBCL cross-compiler built. At that point, it was possible to start running make-host-2.sh , attempting to use the cross-compiler to build the Lisp sources to go into the initial Lisp image for the new, target SBCL. Of course, given that all I had done was create boilerplate, running the cross-compiler was unlikely to end well: and in fact it barely started well, giving an immediate error of functions not being defined.

Well, functions not being defined is a fairly normal state of affairs (fans of static type systems look away now!), and easily fixed: we simply define them until they're not undefined any more, ideally with sensible rather than nonsensical contents. That additional constraint, though, gives us our first opportunity to indulge in some actual thought about our target platform.

The routines we have to define include things like functions to return Temporary Names (registers or stack locations) for such things as the lisp return address, the old frame pointer, and the number of arguments to a function: these are things that will be a part of the lisp calling convention, which may or may not bear much relation to the “native” C calling convention. On most SBCL platforms, it doesn't have much in common, with Lisp execution effectively being one large complicated subroutine when viewed from the prism of the C world; the Lisp execution uses a separate stack, which allows us to be sure about what on the stack is a Lisp object and what might not be (making garbage collectors precise on those platforms).

In the nascent RISC-V port, in common with other 32-register ports, these values of interest will be stored in registers, so we need to think about mapping these concepts to the platform registers, documentation of which can be found at the RISC-V site. In particular, let's have a look at logical page 109 (physical page 121) of the user-level RISC-V ISA specification v2.2:

Register ABI Name Description Saver x0 zero Hard-wired zero - x1 ra Return address Caller x2 sp Stack pointer Callee x3 gp Global pointer - x4 tp Thread pointer - x5 t0 Temporary/Alternate link register Caller x6-7 t1-2 Temporaries Caller x8 s0/fp Saved register/Frame pointer Callee x9 s1 Saved register Callee x10-11 a0-1 Function arguments/return values Caller x12-17 a2-7 Function arguments Caller x18-27 s2-11 Saved registers Callee x28-31 t3-6 Temporaries Caller

The table (and the rest of the document) tells us that x0 is a wired zero: no matter what is written to it, reading from it will always return 0. That's a useful thing to know; we can now define a storage class for zero specifically, and define the zero register at offset 0.

The platform ABI uses x1 for a link register (storing the return address for a subroutine). We may or may not want to use this for our own return address; I'm not yet sure if we will be able to. For now, though, we'll keep it reserved for the platform return address, defining it as register lr in SBCL nomenclature, and use x5 for our own lisp return address register. Why x5 ? The ISA definition for the jalr instruction (Jump And Link Register, logical page 16) informs us that return address prediction hardware should manipulate the prediction stack when either x1 or x5 is used as the link register with jalr , and not when any other register is used; that's what “Alternate link register” means in the above table. We'll see if this choice for our lra register, for Spectre or for worse, gives us any kind of speed boost – or even if it is tenable at all.

We can define the Number Stack Pointer and Number Frame Pointer registers, even though we don't need them yet: in SBCL parlance, the “number” stack is the C stack, and our register table says that those should be x2 and x8 respectively. Next, for our own purposes we will need: Lisp stack, frame and old-frame pointer registers; some function argument registers; and some non-descriptor temporaries. We'll put those semi-arbitrarily in the temporaries and function arguments region of the registers; the only bit of forethought here is to alternate our Lisp arguments and non-descriptor temporaries with one eye on the “C” RISC-V extension for compressed instructions: if an instruction uses registers x8 – x15 and the “C” extension is implemented on a particular RISC-V board, the instruction might be encodable in two bytes instead of four, hopefully reducing instruction loading and decoding time and instruction cache pressure. (This might also be overthinking things at this stage). In the spirit of not overthinking, let's just put nargs on x31 for now.

With all these decisions implemented, we hit our first “real” error! Remembering that we are attempting to compile a very simple file, whose only actual Lisp code involves returning an element from a specialized array, it's great to hit this error because it seems to signify that we are almost ready. The cross-compiler is built knowing that some functions (usually as a result of code transformations) should never be compiled as calls, but should instead be /translated/ using one of our Virtual OPerations. data-vector-ref , which the aref in our scratch.lisp file translates to because of the type declarations, is one such function, so we need to define it: and also define it in such a way that it will be used no matter what the current compiler policy, hence the :policy :fast-safe addition to the reffer macro. (That, and many other such :policy declarations, are dotted around everywhere in the other backends; I may come to regret having taken them out in the initial boilerplate exercise.)