[TUHS] Early Unix function calls: expensive?

[Norman Wilson]

As late as 1990, every UNIX I knew of still used the
expensive calls/ret instructions for subroutine calls.
I vaguely remember a consensus (and I certainly shared
the feeling) that in hindsight it would have been better
to use jsb/rsb, but changing everything would have been
so much work that nobody wanted to do it.

1990 was already past peak VAX in the UNIX world, so
I can't imagine anyone bothering to make such a change
to an existing system after then.  Especially a system
that already had many existing installations who would
have to deal with the resulting compatibility problem.

During the latter part of the 1990s, I was actively
supporting a private UNIX system just for myself on
a few MicroVAXes at home.  One of the things I did
was to write a VAX code generator for the then-current
version of lcc (the one around which the book was
written), so as to have an ISO-compatible compiler
and convert all of /usr/src (not so big even in those
days) to ISO.  It was an interesting exercise and I
learned a lot, but even then, I wasn't brave enough to
adopt an incompatible subroutine-calling convention.

Another big time waste in the original VAX UNIX was
the system-call interface: arguments were left on the
stack (where they had been put before calling the
syscall stub routine in libc); the kernel then had
to do a full-fledged copyin to get them.  It occurred
to me more than once to change the convention and have
the syscall stubs copy the arguments into registers
before executing the chmk (syscall) instruction.
That instruction didn't touch the registers; the
kernel saved them early in the chmk trap routine,
in its own address space, so no copying or access
checking would have been required to fetch their
call-time contents.

That would still have been a messy change to make,
because I'd have to be sure every program had been
relinked with the new-style libc before changing the
kernel.  (This was a system without shared libraries.)
But on a personal system it would have been doable.
I never did.

It's possible that current UNIX-descended/cloned systems
that have VAX ports, like Linux or Open/Free/NetBSD,
have had a chance to start over and do better on
subroutine calls and system calls.  Does anyone know?

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON