[LLVMdev] flag_unit_at_a_time and pass scheduling in llvm-gcc

[Daniel Berlin]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Devang Patel <dpatel at apple.com> wrote:
>
>  On Apr 15, 2008, at 11:49 PM, Duncan Sands wrote:
>
>  > As far as I can see flag_unit_at_a_time
>  > is used to control whether inter-procedural/whole-module passes are
>  > scheduled.
>
>
>  You can do inlining even when flag_unit_at_a_time is off. And one can
>  enable unit-at-a-time without enabling any optimizations.  The unit-at-
>  a-time is not meant to select optimization passes, though it may
>  influence selection.
>
>  Originally, this flag instructs gcc to parse entire source file before
>  producing code. I am told that originally gcc worked on one statement
>  at a time (stmt->parse->optimize->codegen->next-stmt). Later on it was
>  enhanced to work on a function at a time. Next logical step was to
>  work on a source file at a time. IIRC, the flag was required because
>  some of the lang. FE produced parsed trees caused huge amount of
>  memory pressure during code generation making unit-at-a-time not
>  suitable for all languages.
>
Everything is right except for your last sentence or two :)
The real reason for flag_unit_at_a_time was that some
programs/libraries (glibc in particular) required the top level ASM
statements to be output in the same order and place they appear in the
source file (they were using it to change sections, etc).  The
original unit_at_a_time mode did not do this, so we needed a flag to
turn it off in order not to break glibc.
At some point we gave up hope that they would change their ways and
implemented tracking the order of the top level asm statements and
outputting them relative to where they appear in the original source
file.