[LLVMdev] Interprocedural Register Allocation

[Madhusudan C.S]

Hi Jakob,

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Jakob Stoklund Olesen <stoklund at 2pi.dk>wrote:

>
> On Oct 4, 2012, at 2:47 AM, Madhusudan C.S <madhusudancs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  However, I was reading the DeveloperPolicy page and the policy for making
> major
> changes asks the developers to discuss the work here before proceeding.
> So, I am
> writing this mail to kickoff a discussion. I would really like to
> contribute to LLVM and
> I think this is a good place for me to start. Is there something specific
> like a paper
> that you guys would want me to read before diving in?
>
> I understand that register allocation itself is a tricky problem and doing
> an interprocedural
> allocation is extremely hard. But I would like to try, at least try and
> fail if worst comes
> to worst than not doing anything at all. At least by attempting to
> implement that, I will
> have a better understanding of LLVM code base which may come in handy to
> contribute
> to other parts of LLVM.
>
>
> Interprocedural register allocation means different things to different
> people. The approach that is described on the open projects page is quite
> simple; it still runs the register allocator on one function at a time.
>
> I am not aware of any papers describing this simple idea.
>
> Basically, the PrologEpilogInsertion pass will add a bit mask to
> MachineModuleInfo describing which registers are clobbered by the function
> being compiled. Later, when compiling the callers, that bit mask is used to
> initialize the regmask operands on call instructions.
>

So the idea is to sidestep from the calling convention a bit if we
already know that the called function will not be using all the
registers required by the convention and instead use those registers
in the caller?

If I am understanding this correctly, is this something desirable for
LLVM, even if it is not high priority? Would you guys be Ok if I try
to implement this without disturbing the project priorities but with
a little help/guidance? Something that interests me to get started
with LLVM.

>
> See also TargetRegisterInfo::getCallPreservedMask().
>
> /jakob
>
>


-- 
Thanks and regards,
  Madhusudan.C.S
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