doc/develop/global_data.rst

.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+

Global data
===========

Globally required fields are held in the global data structure. A pointer to the
structure is available as symbol gd. The symbol is made available by the macro
%DECLARE_GLOBAL_DATA_PTR.

Register pointing to global data
--------------------------------

On most architectures the global data pointer is stored in a register.

+------------+----------+
| ARC        | r25      |
+------------+----------+
| ARM 32bit  | r9       |
+------------+----------+
| ARM 64bit  | x18      |
+------------+----------+
| M68000     | d7       |
+------------+----------+
| MicroBlaze | r31      |
+------------+----------+
| NDS32      | r10      |
+------------+----------+
| Nios II    | gp       |
+------------+----------+
| PowerPC    | r2       |
+------------+----------+
| RISC-V     | gp (x3)  |
+------------+----------+
| SuperH     | r13      |
+------------+----------+

The sandbox, x86, and Xtensa are notable exceptions.

Clang for ARM does not support assigning a global register. When using Clang
gd is defined as an inline function using assembly code. This adds a few bytes
to the code size.

Binaries called by U-Boot are not aware of the register usage and will not
conserve gd. UEFI binaries call the API provided by U-Boot and may return to
U-Boot. The value of gd has to be saved every time U-Boot is left and restored
whenever U-Boot is reentered. This is also relevant for the implementation of
function tracing. For setting the value of gd function set_gd() can be used.

Global data structure
---------------------

.. kernel-doc:: include/asm-generic/global_data.h
   :internal: