[LLVMdev] How to use MCJIT by default for a target

[Kaylor, Andrew]

It seems to me that MCJIT would be a nice default on the platforms that support it.  On the other hand, I don't like the idea of the default behavior being platform dependent.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing the default is that it would have complicated implications for the automated tests.  The testing of JIT and MCJIT is already a bit of a mess, and changing the default to MCJIT for some platforms while leaving it as JIT for other platforms would make things considerably worse.  I think at this point we'd need to consider cleaning up the JIT/MCJIT nightly tests as a pre-requisite to changing the default, regardless of other considerations.

-Andy


-----Original Message-----
From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of David Tweed
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 8:22 AM
To: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: [LLVMdev] How to use MCJIT by default for a target

Hi, I'm looking into making MCJIT the default for the ARM-Linux-EABI target for lli.

(WHY? the old JIT doesn't really work on ARM, and in particular there are some regression tests of interesting things -- such as profiling -- that fail purely because the default old JIT doesn't work. So a consensus has been reached that the best way forward is to try to make the MCJIT the default for ARM-Linux-EABI and see if that's workable.)

Looking at the lli source code, there's the option UseMCJIT that defaults to false. You can also use -use-mcjit, -use-mcjit=true, -use-mcjit=false. Things would be fine if we could make the option default architecture dependent. However, these defaults are all set-up BEFORE we commit to what architectural triple we're using (as the target triple can be specified via argument). If we try to mess with the option based on the triple after it's gone through parsing rather than the default, we can't distinguish between "false (from default)" and "false (set deliberately)". All this does assume, of course, that it's important to provide a way for the user to stop lli using the MCJIT; I think that's probably wise but maybe it's unnecessary.

Anyway, this sounds like making a default choice based on a target-triple is something that probably ought to be done "using canonical idiom" so it's easily grokked rather than using an ad-hoc approach. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Many thanks,
David Tweed

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