[LLVMdev] Registering a custom opt pass as a default one

[Devang Patel]

On Apr 18, 2011, at 6:46 AM, Alexander Potapenko wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> we're working on compile-time instrumentation for ThreadSanitizer (a
> data race detector, see http://code.google.com/p/data-race-test and
> http://code.google.com/p/data-race-test/wiki/CompileTimeInstrumentation),
> which is implemented as an opt plugin that is ran for each client
> C/C++ module we compile.
> 
> To build a binary consisting of several modules the following steps
> are performed:
> 
> 1. each filename.cc module is translated into LLVM internal
> representation (filename.ll file) using llvm-gcc
> 2. the instrumentation pass is ran on each filename.ll file using opt
> to produce filename-instr.ll
> 3. filename-instr.ll is translated into assembly file filename.S
> 4. filename.S is compiled into filename.o using llvm-gcc
> 5. all .o files are linked together with the runtime library (actually
> ThreadSanitizer) into the
> resulting binary
> 
> In order to compile a large program using GNU make, we had to write
> wrappers for gcc and g++ that parse the command-line args and perform
> either steps 1-4 or step 5, and put those wrappers into $PATH.
> On the other hand, if our opt pass was a default one, we could just do:
>  $ llvm-gcc filename.cc <-opt_pass_name> <additional opt args> -o filename.o
> instead of steps 1-4.
> 
> The question is: does llvm-gcc (or Clang, or whatever) allow to
> register a custom optimization pass as a default one (by means of env
> vars, configuration files or anything besides rebuilding the
> compiler)?

You can modify llvm/Support/StandardPasses.h to include your pass by default one appropriate optimization level is used. However, llvm-gcc or clang works on one source file at a time, so it won't do your step 2) automatically for you. 

What you want is link time optimization. See
	http://llvm.org/docs/LinkTimeOptimization.html
and
	http://llvm.org/docs/GoldPlugin.html

If you add your pass in gold plugin by modifying createStandardLTOPasses() then I believe it will do what you intend to do.

-
Devang