[llvm-dev] Working with X86 registers in MachineInstr

[John Criswell via llvm-dev]

On 8/11/15 5:36 PM, Ethan J. Johnson via llvm-dev wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am attempting to implement the “reaching definitions” data-flow 
> algorithm on (X86) MachineBasicBlocks for an analysis pass. To do 
> this, I need to compute gen/kill sets for machine basic blocks. To 
> start with, I am only considering the general-purpose registers, 
> RAX-R15 and their sub-registers. Thus, I need to examine each 
> MachineInstr to determine which register(s) it defines and/or uses.
>
> I see in the Doxygen that for a MachineOperand, I can call isReg() 
> andgetReg() to figure out which X86 register the operand corresponds 
> to. These return an unsigned int “register number”; but I’m not sure 
> how to identify which register actually corresponds to that number.
>

I believe that the enum values X86::<reg> correspond to the integers 
that you're seeing.  For example, X86::RAX is %rax, X86::RBX is %rbx, etc.

> Also, I will need to identify definitions and uses of registers in 
> instructions. I see that MachineOperand has methods such as isUse(), 
> isDef(), and isKill(), which sound like they might be relevant to what 
> I’m doing; but neither the Doxygen nor the source are particularly 
> helpful as to what they actually do. From the MachineInstr 
> documentation, I gathered that instructions which define a value are 
> always written so that the value being defined is the first operand; 
> but since X86 has instructions that use more than one register as 
> output (multiplication, for instance), I would need to manually 
> account for the semantics of each instruction. Since X86 has a great 
> many instructions to account for, many of them obscure, I would very 
> much prefer not to go this route if LLVM already provides it! :-)
>
> To summarize, my questions are as follows:
>
> 1.How can I determine the actual X86 register that a MachineOperand 
> corresponds to?
>
> 2.What is the best/most straightforward way to determine whether a 
> MachineInstr defines and/or uses a particular register?
>

I'm not sure if LLVM provides what you need, but I think it probably 
does: I believe the Tablegen files contain information on which 
registers are killed by each instruction so that the register allocator 
can do its work.  You should look at the LLVM register allocator code 
and Quentin's code and see what it does and what APIs LLVM provides for 
getting this information.

In the unlikely event that LLVM does not provide the information you 
need, your code will need to understand the semantics of the X86 
instructions and determine which are read and written itself. However, 
if you go that route, all is not lost; your code can initially make 
conservative assumptions about instructions that it does not recognize.

Regards,

John Criswell
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ethan Johnson
>
> /Ethan J. Johnson/
>
> /Computer Science PhD student, Systems group, University of Rochester/
>
> /ejohns48 at cs.rochester.edu/ <mailto:ejohns48 at cs.rochester.edu>
>
> /ethanjohnson at acm.org/ <mailto:ethanjohnson at acm.org>
>
> /PGP pubkey available from public directory or on request/
>
>
>
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-- 
John Criswell
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/criswell

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