[Qemu-devel] [RFC] bitops: Provide sext32() and sext64() for signextending bitfields

[Peter Maydell]

A common operation in instruction decoding is to take a field
from an instruction that represents a signed integer in some
arbitrary number of bits, and sign extend it into a C signed
integer type for manipulation. Provide new functions sext32()
and sext64() to abstract away the bit manipulation.

Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
---
I think we've vaguely tossed around the idea of a function to
abstract away the concept of doing a signextension before,
so here's an RFC...

Does the API look right? The other approach I thought of would
be to have functions sextract32()/sextract64() which work like
the existing extract{32,64} but return signed (and sign
extended) values, but providing the raw sign-extension separately
seemed more flexible. (If we want the sextract ops then we could
implement them as sext32(extract32(value, start, length), length).)

This implementation continues to rely on the behaviour of right-shift
of signed integers (as do most of the places which open-code this
operation today; see also HACKING section 6). If we decide in future
that we'd rather do this in a strictly-portable way we'll have a
single place we need to change.

(PS: Not really very tested yet :-))

 include/qemu/bitops.h |   40 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 40 insertions(+)

diff --git a/include/qemu/bitops.h b/include/qemu/bitops.h
index affcc96..5c6a756 100644
--- a/include/qemu/bitops.h
+++ b/include/qemu/bitops.h
@@ -273,4 +273,44 @@ static inline uint64_t deposit64(uint64_t value, int 
start, int length,
     return (value & ~mask) | ((fieldval << start) & mask);
 }
 
+/**
+ * sext32:
+ * @value: value to sign-extend
+ * @length: length of the bitfield in value
+ *
+ * Sign-extend the least significant @length bits in @value to
+ * a 32 bit signed integer. That is to say, bits address@hidden
+ * are untouched, and bit address@hidden is duplicated into all
+ * higher bits of the returned value.
+ *
+ * Returns: the sign-extended value of the bitfield.
+ */
+static inline int32_t sext32(uint32_t value, int length)
+{
+    /* Note that this implementation relies on right shift of signed
+     * integers being an arithmetic shift.
+     */
+    return ((int32_t)(value << (32 - length))) >> length;
+}
+
+/**
+ * sext64:
+ * @value: value to sign-extend
+ * @length: length of the bitfield in value
+ *
+ * Sign-extend the least significant @length bits in @value to
+ * a 64 bit signed integer. That is to say, bits address@hidden
+ * are untouched, and bit address@hidden is duplicated into all
+ * higher bits of the returned value.
+ *
+ * Returns: the sign-extended value of the bitfield.
+ */
+static inline int64_t sext64(uint64_t value, int length)
+{
+    /* Note that this implementation relies on right shift of signed
+     * integers being an arithmetic shift.
+     */
+    return ((int64_t)(value << (64 - length))) >> length;
+}
+
 #endif
-- 
1.7.9.5