1.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
2
3==========================================
4Notes on register bank usage in the kernel
5==========================================
6
7Introduction
8------------
9
10The SH-3 and SH-4 CPU families traditionally include a single partial register
11bank (selected by SR.RB, only r0 ... r7 are banked), whereas other families
12may have more full-featured banking or simply no such capabilities at all.
13
14SR.RB banking
15-------------
16
17In the case of this type of banking, banked registers are mapped directly to
18r0 ... r7 if SR.RB is set to the bank we are interested in, otherwise ldc/stc
19can still be used to reference the banked registers (as r0_bank ... r7_bank)
20when in the context of another bank. The developer must keep the SR.RB value
21in mind when writing code that utilizes these banked registers, for obvious
22reasons. Userspace is also not able to poke at the bank1 values, so these can
23be used rather effectively as scratch registers by the kernel.
24
25Presently the kernel uses several of these registers.
26
27	- r0_bank, r1_bank (referenced as k0 and k1, used for scratch
28	  registers when doing exception handling).
29
30	- r2_bank (used to track the EXPEVT/INTEVT code)
31
32		- Used by do_IRQ() and friends for doing irq mapping based off
33		  of the interrupt exception vector jump table offset
34
35	- r6_bank (global interrupt mask)
36
37		- The SR.IMASK interrupt handler makes use of this to set the
38		  interrupt priority level (used by local_irq_enable())
39
40	- r7_bank (current)
41