as: Xtensa Jump Relaxation
9.54.4.3 Jump Relaxation
........................
Jump instruction may require relaxation because the Xtensa jump
instruction ('J') provide a PC-relative offset of only 128 Kbytes in
either direction. One option is to use jump long ('J.L') instruction,
which depending on jump distance may be assembled as jump ('J') or
indirect jump ('JX'). However it needs a free register. When there's
no spare register it is possible to plant intermediate jump sites
(trampolines) between the jump instruction and its target. These sites
may be located in areas unreachable by normal code execution flow, in
that case they only contain intermediate jumps, or they may be inserted
in the middle of code block, in which case there's an additional jump
from the beginning of the trampoline to the instruction past its end.
So, for example:
j 1f
...
retw
...
mov a10, a2
call8 func
...
1:
...
might be relaxed to:
j .L0_TR_1
...
retw
.L0_TR_1:
j 1f
...
mov a10, a2
call8 func
...
1:
...
or to:
j .L0_TR_1
...
retw
...
mov a10, a2
j .L0_TR_0
.L0_TR_1:
j 1f
.L0_TR_0:
call8 func
...
1:
...
The Xtensa assembler uses trampolines with jump around only when it
cannot find suitable unreachable trampoline. There may be multiple
trampolines between the jump instruction and its target.
This relaxation does not apply to jumps to undefined symbols,
assuming they will reach their targets once resolved.
Jump relaxation is enabled by default because it does not affect code
size or performance while the code itself is small. This relaxation may
be disabled completely with '--no-trampolines' or '--no-transform'
command-line options (Command-line Options Xtensa Options.).