[LLVMdev] Removing TargetMachine CPU auto-detection for PowerPC and SystemZ?

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ulrich Weigand" <Ulrich.Weigand at de.ibm.com>
> To: "Hal J. Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu, grosbach at apple.com
> Sent: Monday, March 23, 2015 12:21:17 PM
> Subject: Removing TargetMachine CPU auto-detection for PowerPC and SystemZ?
> 
> 
> Hi Hal,
> 
> I only just noticed that about a year ago, Jim removed CPU
> auto-detection
> for the X86 target:
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-April/071991.html
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20140407/212676.html
> 
> >Currently the X86 backend does CPU auto-detection and subtarget
> >feature
> >detection when the TargetMachine is created if no explicit CPU was
> >specified. It's counterintuitive for low level tools like ‘llc’ to
> >do
> >this, as it means the same .ll file compiled on heterogenous
> >machines
> >generates different results from the same ‘llc’ command line. It is
> >still
> >useful to be able to opt-in to such behavior to, for example,
> >replicate
> >clang’s behavior when -mcpu=native is supplied to clang. My thought
> >is
> >to do something similar here and teach ‘llc’ to recognize
> >-mcpu=native
> >and probe the host CPU if that is given. The subtarget features will
> >then be filled in according to the feature string for that CPU. This
> >(a) changes the auto-detection from opt-out to opt-in and (b) moves
> >the logic out of the core target backend and into the tools drivers.
> 
> >Attached are draft patches that do this for X86. Similar but smaller
> >cleanups can also be done for SystemZ and PowerPC if it’s agreed
> >this
> >is a good idea.
> 
> However, this was then never implemented for SystemZ and PowerPC.
>  Should
> we do so as well?

Yes, I think we should.

 -Hal

> 
> Note that mesa has in the meantime changed to do the auto-detection
> before
> setting up the JIT context, and I assume other JIT users have done so
> as
> well by now.  For clang, this was never done automatically anyway.
> 
> 
> Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
> 
> Ulrich Weigand
> 
> --
>   Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
>   STSM, GNU/Linux compilers and toolchain
>   IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory