[llvm-dev] RFC: callee saved register verifier

[Andrew Trick via llvm-dev]

> On May 13, 2016, at 3:32 PM, Sanjoy Das <sanjoy at playingwithpointers.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This is a proposal to introduce a mechanism to LLVM that uses runtime
> instrumentation to verify that a call target preserves all of the
> registers it says it does.  Internally, we have a diverse set of
> calling conventions for runtime functions that get called from LLVM
> compiled code, and having some sort of validation mechanism will give
> us more confidence in selecting aggressive calling conventions for
> these.
> 
> The general idea is this: before every call store a cookie in all the
> registers that the call is supposed to preserve, and after the call
> returns, assert that the supposedly callee saved registers weren't
> clobbered.  

More importantly, the runtime needs to have a mode that forcibly clobbers all caller-save registers, which I’m sure you’re already doing.

You could do this after regalloc and verify only the callee-save registers that are not already live to avoid slowdowns due to spilling. Your approach sounds like it would work ok in practice though.

Andy