Michael Hitch's (04/04/2000 11:18:54) description of why the inline
assembler only allocatd eight bytes is correct. I beleive Michael and
I talked about allocating all 24 at one point, but we decided not to
burn the extra kstack space.


and re Simon's question:

>Two questions though.  I don't think I need to declare $at as a used
>register in MCOUNT_ENTER - does anyone know for sure?  Related to this,
>MCOUNT saves and restores $at - would the compiler use $at in normal use
>or can we discard those instructions?


That assembly code gets used for both kernel and userlevel
profiling. (I think userland profiling is still busted, but thats a
story for another day).  If you _do_ delete the ".set noat", you
better be sure that neither compiler nor assembler leaves $at live
around code which might clobber it.

If the "at" note is good enough for that, then fine. It's kinda
gcc-specific, though :).