[LLVMdev] adding support for -ffixed-<reg>

Chris Lattner clattner at apple.com
Tue Oct 2 22:29:25 PDT 2012


On Oct 2, 2012, at 7:23 AM, Matthew Curtis <mcurtis at codeaurora.org> wrote:
> I'm adding support for -ffixed-<reg> for Hexagon and was wondering if I should do it in such a way that other targets get the support as well by default or if a given target back-end should have to explicitly opt-in for support.

It would be great to have this as a target-indepentent (well, obviously the specific register names are target specific, you know what I mean) compiler feature.  This is one of the blocking issues preventing some portion of the Linux kernel from "just working" with LLVM.

>From the design perspective, I think it would make sense to represent this in LLVM IR with named metadata (http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#namedmetadatastructure) like "!llvm.fixedregs".  This could then be picked up by the code generator, installed as preallocated registers (Jakob would be the one to ask how best to do this).

If you're not in a huge hurry, an even better way to model this is with Bill Wendling's work on generalized function attributes.  Our eventual goal is to allow arbitrary target-specific function attributes.  Modeling this list as a per-function attribute would be much cleaner, and allow -ffixed-<reg> to work with LTO.

-Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20121002/822f09f0/attachment.html>


More information about the llvm-dev mailing list