[LLVMdev] Adding legal integer sizes to TargetData

[Dale Johannesen]

On Feb 1, 2009, at 11:06 PMPST, Chris Lattner wrote:

> Now that 2.5 is about to branch, I'd like to bring up one of Scott's
> favorite topics: certain optimizers widen or narrow arithmetic,
> without regard for whether the type is legal for the target.  In his
> specific case, instcombine is turning an i32 multiply into an i64
> multiply in order to eliminate a cast.  This does simplify/reduce the
> number of IR operations, but an i64 multiply is dramatically more
> expensive than an i32 multiply on CellSPU.

I basically agree with Scott on this:  we shouldn't reintroduce types  
that
are illegal for the target after Legalize.

> There are a couple of different ways to look at this.  On the one
> hand, I still strongly believe that codegen should be able to re-
> narrow operations (and it does on his testcase on i386).  However,
> codegen is currently doing these optimizations on a per-basic block
> basis, and we're not likely to have whole-function dags in the near
> future, so there is an inherent limit to its power.
>
> An earlier place to handle this is in codegen prepare, which is
> global.  However, the bad thing about this is that it would
> effectively require duplicating all the type legalization code in CGP,
> which is a pass we want to shrink, not grow.  OTOH, the whole CGP pass
> is really a hack around selection dags not being whole-function.
>
> A third way to handle this is to add to target data a notion of
> "native types".  Instcombine could then be constrained to not do the
> widening/narrowing transformations when the original type (i32 in this
> case) was native but the destination type (i64) is non-native.
>
> On the one hand, adding this to targetdata is simple and straight-
> forward with well-defined semantics.  OTOH, it is somewhat ugly that
> IR canonicalization gets a bit more target-specific.

IR after Legalize is target-specific (indeed that's Legalizer's job),  
so I don't see
why you should expect to treat it in a target-independent way.  This  
seems
like the right fix to me.  (I don't offhand see why the separation  
into legal and
illegal types that we already have isn't enough, but no doubt you're  
right.)

> On the third
> hand, instcombine already promotes indices of GEPs to match the
> pointer size etc, so it wouldn't be too crazy for it to do this.
>
> What do others think about this?
>
> -Chris
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