[LLVMdev] Testing Target Optimization via ASM Injection

[Isaac Asay]

My name is Isaac. I emailed this mailing list a couple years ago because I
was working on an ARM specific target optimization for my thesis, and had
questions about moving instructions and properly migrating kill flags. I
have managed to get that working properly, and I now have a complete
optimization that I wish to test.

My question is simply this: Is there any established way to inject ARM
assembly code into LLVM such that the ASM you inject has the
target-specific optimizations performed on it? In other words, I'm looking
for a way to do "ARM ASM test case" -> "LLVM target optimization" ->
"optimized ARM ASM."

The reason I'm trying to do this is because the specific case I'm
optimizing against is proving difficult to generate using C code source
files. The optimization requires a particular combination of memory
instructions to be present in order to work. I've also tried using asm() C
calls to force a specific assembly pattern, but LLVM appears to treat the
asm() call like a single atomic block that does not have the optimizer run
on its member instructions.

I am sure that development on some of the target optimizations for LLVM
required some very specific sequences of instructions to be present that
might be difficult to generate using C code or even LLVM bitcode. What
tools exist to make this testing process easier for developers? Is there
some way to run target ASM optimizations using ASM input?

Thanks for your time,

Isaac Asay

P.S.: In case you want more details, I asked a Stack Overflow question on
this issue and was referred back to this mail list:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6084052/testing-a-code-generator-optimization
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