[LLVMdev] adding switches to llvm-ld to disable certain optimizations.

[Sanjiv Gupta]

Dan Gohman wrote:
> Have you ever investigated the following approach?   Define fake
> register+register forms of common instructions, in addition to the
> register+memory forms. Let the instruction selector work as if
> everything were in registers.  Then, since there's only one physical
> register, the register allocator will have to spill, and the spills
> and reloads can be folded in, eliminating the take register+register
> forms. You might need special handling for the case where both
> operands are the same.
>
> If this works well enough, it would allow your target to be less
> strange from LLVM's perspective. Fewer things would need to be
> Custom-expanded (e.g. ADD), and it may even allow you to actually
> run more of the optimizer (since without mem2reg, much of the
> optimizer is effectively disabled).
>
> Dan
>
>   
I remember that you had suggested this in one of earlier emails as well, 
which I lost. And I was desperately searching for that email. Glad that 
you put up it again.
The approach actually sounds better as it will drastically simplify the 
back-end code. But I was clueless as to how to make register allocator 
fold the spills and reloads into the actual target instructions. The 
only interfaces that it exposes are saveRegToStackSlot and 
loadRegFromStackSlot, and we didn't even know for which instructions 
these spills are reloads are happening. All these APIs get is a frameIndex.
Now that you have decided to get us to explore a better path, it would 
be good if you could put more light to these issues.

One more thing that I feel will simplify things in a great sense is to 
make i16 legal (as it would make the pointer legal) and there onwards 
lower the types/operations ourselves to 8-bit (as type legalizer 
wouldn't do that). By doing that we would pretty much need to duplicate 
the legalizer code in our back-end as the TypeLegalizer interfaces 
currently are not exposed to TargetLowering. Or can a back-end just 
create an instance of Type Legalizer and use it?

Thanks,
- Sanjiv