[LLVMdev] Enumerating machine functions

[Duncan Sands]

Hi Lorenzo,

> thanks for your reply. So if I understand correctly MachineFunction
> objects are converted to machine code one at a time, and each object
> is "thrown away" after having been converted.

actually that's not quite what I meant.  I was saying that the code
generators must not assume that the whole module is available.  For
example, it would be wrong when codegening a function to examine the
bodies of any functions it calls in the same module, or to examine
the initial values for any global variables it uses etc.  The reason
that this would be wrong is that it won't work if a front-end creates
a module which only contains declarations, then successively inserts
a body for each function into the IR, codegens that function, then
deletes the body for that function before moving on to the next one.
llvm-gcc has code for doing this for example, though it is currently
turned off.

  Seems that the only way
> to achieve what I have in mind is to write the machine code for all
> the functions to a file, and then load it and process it in a separate
> tool (possibly based on LLVM-mc). Is this correct?

I think you should do this kind of thing as a module level pass on the
LLVM IR, i.e. before doing code generation.

Ciao, Duncan.

>
> Thanks,
> Lorenzo
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Duncan Sands<baldrick at free.fr>  wrote:
>> Hi Lorenzo,
>>
>>> I have a doubt about running passes on machine code. We are
>>> implementing a transformation on machine code that consists in
>>> analyzing a series of functions, extracting some aggregate properties,
>>> and then using the extracted information to optimize each functions.
>>>
>>> I am not familiar with LLVM internals, so I am not sure how to
>>> implement each step. From the documentation, it seems that the only
>>> way to work on the machine-dependent representation is to write a
>>> MachineFunctionPass. However, such pass would be run separately on
>>> every function, while what we need is pretty much a ModulePass running
>>> on machine code, or some way to enumerate all the MachineFunction
>>> objects. Is there any way to achieve this?
>>
>> one of the design goals of LLVM codegen is to be able to codegen one function
>> at a time, so the front-end can generate a function, codegen it, then throw
>> away the function before moving onto the next function.
>>
>> Ciao, Duncan.
>> _______________________________________________
>> LLVM Developers mailing list
>> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
>> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev
>>