[LLVMdev] adding support for -ffixed-<reg>

[陳韋任 (Wei-Ren Chen)]

> From the GCC manual (http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.7.2/gcc/
> Code-Gen-Options.html#index-ffixed-2267)
> 
> -ffixed-reg
> 
>     Treat the register named reg as a fixed register; generated code should
>     never refer to it (except perhaps as a stack pointer, frame pointer or in
>     some other fixed role).
> 
>     reg must be the name of a register. The register names accepted are
>     machine-specific and are defined in the REGISTER_NAMES macro in the machine
>     description macro file.
> 
> 
> Useful when writing kernel code or other low-level code (e.g. a VM) where you
> want to reserve a particular register for your own use.

  Ya, I saw people writing VM often ask for this functionality on ML.
But I have a question, what the difference between this and global
register [1]? To me, they both seems to reserve particular register
from being used by the compiler. If they're the same, I remember Chris
objected to add global register feature in LLVM.

Regards,
chenwj

[1] http://nondot.org/sabre/LLVMNotes/GlobalRegisterVariables.txt

-- 
Wei-Ren Chen (陳韋任)
Computer Systems Lab, Institute of Information Science,
Academia Sinica, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
Tel:886-2-2788-3799 #1667
Homepage: http://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~chenwj