[LLVMdev] question about llvm.powi and reassociation

Török Edwin edwintorok at gmail.com
Mon Jul 27 13:33:53 PDT 2009


On 2009-07-26 23:53, Kyle Davis wrote:
>
> Hello, all. To get my feet wet and hopefully make a small
> contribution, I was looking for something small to start with. I
> settled on one of the suggestions from the CodeGen readme:
>
> > Reassociate should turn things like:
> > 
> > int factorial(int X) {
> >  return X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X;
> > }
> > 
> > into llvm.powi calls, allowing the code generator to
> > produce balanced multiplication trees.
>
> I started getting familiar with the relevant parts of the code and see
> two problems with this as things currently stand:
>
>  - llvm.powi, in both the documentation and the code, is a
> floating-point-only intrinsic.
>
>  - the reassociate pass avoids doing anything to floating point
> operands regardless of the state of the "enable-unsafe-fp-math" flag.
>
> Both of these are adjustable, but as I'm trying to ramp up I figured
> it would be good to ask to make sure I'm understanding what I'm seeing
> correctly. If I am, I feel like perhaps I've chosen poorly for a
> starting project.


This one looks interesting from README.txt:

"viterbi speeds up *significantly* if the various "history" related copy
loops
are turned into memcpy calls at the source level.  We need a "loops to
memcpy"
pass."

I think the loops it refers to are these:
for (j=0; j<MAX_history; ++j) {
          history_new[i][j+1] = history[2*i][j];
        }

ScalarEvolution in LLVM will tell you an expression for the indices:
{((144 * (%tmp226608 /u 2)) + %history_new),+,144}
{%history_new,+,144}

Thus you'll only need to figure out whether the indices overlap or not,
and in which direction to copy (using memcpy/memmove as appropriate).

Just a suggestion,
--Edwin



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