[LLVMdev] Expand vector type

[James Molloy]

Hi,

 

* Is there a way to setup LLVM to automatically convert vec3s to vec4s?

 

Yes, if you specify v3i16 and friends as "promote" instead of "legal", llvm
will promote it to a v4i16. The ARM NEON backend does this already. I'm
surprised you haven't got this happening already as you mention that LLVM
widens your loads to 4-element vectors. (this should happen during DAG type
legalization, by the way).

 

Cheers,

 

James

 

From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On
Behalf Of Martinez, Javier E
Sent: 29 February 2012 00:27
To: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: [LLVMdev] Expand vector type

 

Hello,

 

My input language has support for 3 and 4 element vectors but my target only
has support for the latter. The language defines vec3 with the same storage
space as vec4 so from a backend perspective they are both the same. I'd
really like if I could have LLVM treat vec3 as vec4 but I haven't found out
how.

 

Currently the target has emulated support for vec3 through LLVM. Loads are
already widened by LLVM to a vec4. Stores are kind of funny. By default LLVM
sets the action to 'widen' but in GenWidenVectorStores what ends up
happening is an 2:1 split of the vector that's less efficient in this case
than actually widening the vector. The reason is that at this point the call
to FindMemType assumes that stores can never be widened to a bigger type and
so those types are not considered. The call sequence I'm looking at is
WidenVectorOperand() -> WidenVecOp_STORE() -> GenWidenVectorStores() ->
FindMemType(). I've made a very small modification to enable support for
widening stores to a larger type.

 

Before spending more time on working on a generic solution I have a couple
of questions:

* Is there a way to setup LLVM to automatically convert vec3s to vec4s?

* Is there interest in adding support for widened vector stores to a larger
type?

 

Thanks,

Javier

 

 
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