[LLVMdev] Contributing a new target to LLVM

[Tom Stellard]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 03:00:30PM -0000, Martin J. O'Riordan wrote:
> Hi LLVM and CLang Devs,
> 
>  
> 
> At the moment my company (Movidius) is considering contributing the changes
> we have made to LLVM and CLang in order to support our proprietary
> processor, and I would like to seek advice on how best to approach doing
> this?  I am pretty sure that there are coding guidelines and conventions
> that we should be following but have not followed over the course of the
> last few years, and we will have to go through the process of preparing the
> sources so that they are suitable for pushing back to the LLVM and CLang
> community, though I expect that as a small team of 2 developers this is
> likely to take us several months.
> 
>

Are you able to give more information about the processor?  Is it a CPU,
GPU, DSP?

> 
> Are there any existing documents that I should read to help us prepare our
> code so that it might be acceptable to the LLVM (and CLang) communities?
> What guidelines are there for contributors submitting new targets to LLVM,
> how they should maintain them in the future, and how to ensure that other
> targets are not negatively impacted by the addition?
> 
>  

Here are a few suggestions for starting the process of getting your
backend upstream.


- Publish your code somewhere public (github, bitbucket, etc.) as soon as you
can.

- Adopt an 'upstream' development model, which means moving your patch
  review process to the public mailing lists and committing changes
  directly to LLVM ToT (or your temporary public repo).  Whether you
  commit to internal trees first and then commit upstream or the other
  way around is up to you, but the point is that your interaction with
  LLVM ToT should not be monthly patch bombs.

- Make sure you comply with the coding standards
  (http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html)

- If you have changes to core libraries, break them up into small
  self-contained patches and send them to the mailing lists.

- When targets are first added to LLVM, they are built using the
  experimental target options.  Make this change internally to make it
  easier to merge your code.

- As you prepare the code, keep the community in the loop on the
  progress (this is where it helps to have a public repo).

This is not a complete list, but hopefully it will help get you started.


-Tom
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
>  
> 
>             Martin
> 
> _______________________________________________________________
> 
> Martin J. O'Riordan                Email:
> <mailto:Martin.ORiordan at movidius.com> Martin.ORiordan at movidius.com
> 
> Compiler Development               Web:     <http://www.movidius.com>
> www.movidius.com
> 
> Movidius Ltd.                      Skype:  moviMartinO
> 
> 1st Floor,  O'Connell Bridge House,  d'Olier Street,  Dublin 2, Ireland
> 
>  
> 

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