[LLVMdev] Generating superblocks (SEME regions w/o loops and calls) in LLVM

[Alexander Potapenko]

Hi all,

While developing compile-time instrumentation for ThreadSanitizer
(http://code.google.com/p/data-race-test) I need to generate SEME
regions without loop and call instructions
(I'll call them superblocks hereafter, although some researchers do
allow loops in their definition of superblocks).

This is necessary to get the largest piece of IR in which the memory
operations can be enumerated in order to record the addresses of the
memory accesses into a fixed-size buffer.

So far I was using my home-brewed structure to hold the superblocks:

struct SBlock {
  BlockSet blocks;
  llvm::BasicBlock *entry;
  BlockSet exits;
  InstSet mops_to_instrument;
  int num_mops;
  SBlock() : num_mops(0) {}
};

and several functions that split basic blocks to eliminate calls from
them, traverse the call graph and create the SBlock instances from the
basic blocks.

Now I want to simplify my instrumentation pass and move that
superblock creation logic out of it.
Is there a strong need to make such a functionality common? Can other
passes benefit from it?

There's also the Trace class, which can be used to hold the
superblocks, but I haven't found any code that generates them at
compile time (in my case those should not depend on any dynamic
analysis).


Thanks in advance,
Alexander Potapenko
Software Engineer
Google Moscow