@bcmills requested issue #50671 to be considered for backport to the next 1.17 minor release.

@gopherbot, please backport to Go 1.16 and Go 1.17. This is a compiler bug that causes subtle run-time data corruption; it is hard to predict which code might be affected, and the corrupted paths might not be triggered by tests, but it appears to cause a nonzero rate of failures in the Go builders. The fix is small and MIPS-specific, so backporting it seems low-risk.