[llvm-dev] [RFC] BasicAA considers address spaces?

[Hal Finkel via llvm-dev]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "escha" <escha at apple.com>
> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: "Matt Arsenault" <Matthew.Arsenault at amd.com>, llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org, "Justin Holewinski"
> <jholewinski at nvidia.com>
> Sent: Sunday, August 9, 2015 7:46:26 AM
> Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] [RFC] BasicAA considers address spaces?
> 
> Personally I feel the most intuitive approach would be to have an
> equivalent of isTriviallyDisjoint for IR; we already have a model
> for how it would work, and it could be a TTI call. I’ve kind of
> wanted this for a while because there’s a lot of address-space-esque
> aliasing relationships that can’t be easily modeled on the IR level.
> 
> For example (in our model), we have some constraints like this:
> 
> Global memory can’t alias local memory.
> Global writeable memory can’t alias global readonly memory (different
> address spaces).
> Stack memory can’t alias global memory (different address spaces).
> Texture reads cannot alias texture writes, because you can’t bind a
> texture as readable and writeable at the same time. Texture writes,
> however, can alias each other.
> Vertex shader outputs can’t really alias each other, even though they
> are technically “stores”.
> (there’s more where that came from)
> 
> These are all very trivial to express in code (the trivially disjoint
> function in our backend is like 50 lines of code to cover all the
> cases), but a few of them are slightly more complex than “address
> space A can’t alias B”, so having a generic callback might be nicer
> and more powerful than a “does address space A alias address space
> B” callback, I think.

Could you provide a specific example of a case where the address space is not enough? [maybe you did above, but if so, I don't know which one].

Perhaps we should just do the most generic thing: Provide an AA/TTI shim which allows any target provide an implementation of AA (as part of the chain of AA passes). Thoughts?

 -Hal

> 
> —escha

-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory