[LLVMdev] A few questions from a newbie

[Jakob Stoklund Olesen]

On 20/04/2009, at 07.35, Peter Bacon wrote:

> Hello, I am learning to write a new backend for LLVM and have a few  
> simple questions.

Hi Peter,

I am a newbie too, but I have recently dealt with the same issues.

> 1) What are the differences between 'constant' and 'targetconstant',  
> 'globaladdress' and 'targetglobaladdress'? It is not clear from the  
> document when and which should be used.

The target* variants are 'done' and will not be changed further by the  
instruction selection. After instruction selection, everything should  
be converted to the target* variants.

> 2) On the processor I am working on, there is a 'move reg, mem_addr'  
> instruction.
>
> When I try to match it using the pattern  [(set Int32Regs::reg,  
> tglobaladdr::mem_addr)]. the code generated by tblgen cannot be  
> compiled because there will be a switch statement that contains two  
> cases for the 'tglobaladdr', one is hard-coded in by tblgen and the  
> other is generated by tbglen following the pattern I specified. The  
> compilation fails because of the two duplicated and conflicting cases.

This happened to me too. I stole a solution from the other targets -  
create a wrapper node:

def BfinWrapper: SDNode<"BfinISD::Wrapper", SDTIntUnaryOp>;

Then custom lower ISD::GlobalAddress, converting it to a wrapped  
TargetGlobalAddress:

SDValue
BlackfinTargetLowering::LowerGlobalAddress(SDValue Op, SelectionDAG  
&DAG)
{
   DebugLoc DL = Op.getDebugLoc();
   GlobalValue *GV = cast<GlobalAddressSDNode>(Op)->getGlobal();

   Op = DAG.getTargetGlobalAddress(GV, MVT::i32);
   return DAG.getNode(BfinISD::Wrapper, DL, MVT::i32, Op);
}

Now you can pattern match on the wrapper:

def : Pat<(BfinWrapper (i32 tglobaladdr:$addr)),
           (LOAD32imm tglobaladdr:$addr)>;

If you think this is overly complicated, I agree.
Does anybody know why this is necessary?

/jakob