<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div>Hi River,</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I’m working on the MachineOutliner pass at the MIR level. Working at the IR level sounds interesting! It also seems like our algorithms are similar. I was thinking of taking the suffix array route with the MachineOutliner in the future. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>Anyway, I’d like to ask about this:</div><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jul 20, 2017, at 3:47 PM, River Riddle via llvm-dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" class="">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: pre-wrap; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">The downside to having this type of transformation be at the IR level is it means there will be less accuracy in the cost model - we can somewhat accurately model the cost per instruction but we can’t get information on how a window of instructions may lower. This can cause regressions depending on the platform/codebase, therefore to help alleviate this there are several tunable parameters for the cost model.</span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>The inliner is threshold-based and it can be rather unpredictable how it will impact the code size of a program. Do you have any idea as to how heuristics/thresholds/parameters could be tuned to prevent this? In my experience, making good code size decisions with these sorts of passes requires a lot of knowledge about what instructions you’re dealing with exactly. I’ve seen the inliner cause some pretty serious code size regressions in projects due to small changes to the cost model/parameters which cause improvements in other projects. I’m a little worried that an IR-level outliner for code size would be doomed to a similar fate.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Perhaps it would be interesting to run this sort of pass pre-register allocation? This would help pull you away from having to use heuristics, but give you some more opportunities for finding repeated instruction sequences. I’ve thought of doing something like this in the future with the MachineOutliner and seeing how it goes.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>- Jessica</div><br class=""></body></html>