[LLVMdev] Loop-specific optimizations

[Ralf Karrenberg]

Hi Tim,

we at Saarland University are working on something similar to what you 
are describing. In principle, we enhance Clang by an attribute that 
allows to specify what transformation phases should be run on the 
annotated construct (currently functions, compound statements, or loops) 
and in what order.
Will you be at the LLVM Euro Conference? We will have a lightning talk 
and poster on the topic there.

Cheers,
Ralf

On 4/3/13 10:00 AM, Tim Besard wrote:
> Hi al,
>
> At our lab we're using LLVM to optimize and compile code to be run on a
> CGRA processor, capable of executing parts of an application (mostly
> loops) very efficiently. Since we are talking about a VLIW processor,
> this code is generally being processed quite different than code for an
> OoO-processor would be (e.g. modulo scheduled). This makes that
> otherwise performance-enhancing optimizations can wreck our schedule.
>
> We try to cope with this by selectively applying transformations to
> loops. Initially we annotated loops with a pragma, and modified passes
> to honour this pragma, but this proved to be cumbersome. It also didn't
> work very well with function passes, which we then disabled altogether.
>
> Recently we've been looking into outlining the relevant loop bodies to a
> new function, and selecting transformations for this function. This
> would only require modifying the pass manager, and would enable us to
> specialize function passes as well.
>
> Does this seem like a good way to specialize transformations for loop
> bodies, or are there better ways to accomplish this? Some of the issues
> I can already think of:
> * overhead caused by argument passing -- can be fixed by inlining the
> function again before register allocation?
> * some optimizations (e.g. licm) won't be possible any more
> * merging/rearranging loops won't be possibly (I'm thinking of Polly here)
>
> Thanks,
>