[llvm-dev] RFC: Extending atomic loads and stores to floating point and vector types

[Philip Reames via llvm-dev]

Currently, we limit atomic loads and stores to either pointer or integer 
types.  I would like to propose that we extend this to allow both 
floating point and vector types which meet the other requirements.  
(i.e. power-of-two multiple of 8 bits, and aligned)

This will enable a couple of follow on changes:
1) Teaching the vectorizer how to vectorize unordered atomic loads and 
stores
2) Removing special casing around type canonicalization of loads in 
various passes
3) Removing complexity from language frontends which need to support 
atomic operations on floating point types.

My initial implementation plan will not require any changes from the 
backends.  I plan to add a lowering step to the existing 
AtomicExpandPass which will convert atomic operations on floats and 
vectors to their equivalently sized integer counterparts.  Over time, 
individual backends will be able to opt in - via a TTI hook - to have 
the new types of atomics handled by the normal isel machinery.

I've prototyped this approach with the x86 backend and get what looks 
like correct and even fairly efficient instruction selection taking 
place.  I haven't studied it too extensively, so it might not work out 
in the end, but the approach appears generally feasible.

One open question I don't know the answer to: Are there any special 
semantics required from floating point stores which aren't met by simply 
bitcasting their result to i32 (float) or i64 (double) and storing the 
result?  In particular, I'm unsure of the semantics around 
canonicalization here.  Are there any? Same for loads?

Philip