[LLVMdev] Registers and Register Units

[Jakob Stoklund Olesen]

You may have noticed Andy and me committing TableGen patches for "register units". I thought I'd better explain what they are.


Some targets have instructions that operate on sequences of registers. I'll use ARM examples because it is the most notorious. ARM has, for example:

  vld1.64 {d1, d2}, [r0]

The instruction loads two d-registers, but they must be consecutive. ARM also names even-odd pairs of d-registers, q0 = {d0, d1}, but odd-even pairs have no other name than {d1, d2}.

LLVM models the sequence constraint as a single super-register, so we define pseudo-registers D1_D2, D3_D4, … in addition to the existing Q0, Q1, … From the register allocator's point of view, the vld1.64 instruction has two operands: a GPR operands for the address, and a DPair operand representing the two consecutive d-registers.

This model makes it easy to handle register sequence constraints, and we don't have to worry about what ISA designers decide to call a 'register'. The cost is a fairly high number of pseudo-registers that the ISA didn't dare to name. ARM currently has 277 registers, some named by the ISA, some pseudo-registers representing sequence constraints.


Register units help alleviate the pain of having many registers. They represent the 'basic units of interference', typically corresponding to the leaf registers. (Those without any sub-registers). A target has fewer register units than registers, and forming pseudo-super-registers to model constraints doesn't create more register units.

Each register is assigned a list of register units such that:

  RegA overlaps RegB if and only if Units(RegA) intersects Units(RegB).

On X86, for example, the register units are the 8-bit registers: AH, AL, BH, BL, … The 64-bit register %rax is assigned units (AH, AL), and so is %eax. It is easy to check that %rax and %eax overlaps because they have the same register units. In general, registers only need to have one register unit in common.

These are some of the X86 register to register unit mappings:

  %rax -> {AH, AL}
  %eax -> {AH, AL}
  %ax  -> {AH, AL}
  %ah  -> {AH}
  %al  -> {AH}
  %rbx -> {BH, BL}
  …
  %r8  -> {R8B}
  …
  %xmm0 -> {XMM0}
  %ymm0 -> {XMM0}

X86 has 87 register units compared to 160 registers, making it possible for the register allocator to track interference more compactly.
   

Register units also enable accurate register pressure tracking in spite of overlapping register classes and aliasing registers. This is what Andy has been implementing in RegisterPressure.h. Register classes are mapped to corresponding sets of register units, and by counting units instead of registers, problems with aliasing registers go away.

/jakob