[LLVMdev] Is LLVM’s floating point operations IEEE 754 compliant on x86?

[Tim Northover]

Hi Chen,

This isn't really my area, but I'll do my best in the hope that any
mistakes I make will annoy people enough to correct me...

> Is it IEEE 754 compliant by default?

I believe so, apart from things like exceptions and probably reliable
support for things like C's "#pragma fenv"

> From LLVM language reference manual, I saw there are several floating point types defined, e.g., x86_fp80 to use 80-bit x87 register, and double of 64-bit. Does this imply that x87 is only supported when an explicit x86_fp80 is declared or it is also supported in intermediate results of 64-bit double floating point operations? Anything to do with the fast-math flag?

I believe we only use x87 for float & double types if we absolutely
have to (i.e. SSE isn't available).

> I have also found a old note on LLVM’s floating point operations back to 2004 (http://nondot.org/sabre/LLVMNotes/FloatingPointChanges.txt) and I am not sure if it is still valid today.

Probably not, at least in the details. LLVM has changed a lot since
2004. I think we're still strict by default but the floating-point
instructions have fast-math flags that can be applied to enable
relaxed optimisations
(http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#fast-math-flags).

> Based on what I found so far, I think LLVM’s default setting is to only allow fmuladd as fused floating point operations (defined by FPOpFusion in TargetOptions.h), but I am not sure how x87 is used. Dose anyone know some details of those?

The fmuladd sounds about right (well, there's also a @llvm.fma which
will always be fused, regardless of benefit I think).

> Also, what does LLVM do with compile time optimizations on floating point? For example, constant folding on (1.5 + 2.5 + 3.5), does it use the same precision on the intermediate result or it only does one rounding at the end?

We have an APFloat class which performs the operations in software and
will round at each step. It's *probably* used reliably.

Cheers.

Tim.