[llvm-dev] Vectorization with fast-math on irregular ISA sub-sets

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 11 February 2016 at 11:23, Martin J. O'Riordan
<martin.oriordan at movidius.com> wrote:
> But the v3.8 FP optimiser now recognises this pattern and replaces it with an ISD::FABS node and broke our workaround :-)  It's a great optimisation and I have no problem with its correctness, but I was thinking that perhaps I might see where I should extend the target information interface to allow a target to say that it does not support denormals so that this and possibly other optimisations could be suppressed in a target dependent way.

Hi Martin,

So, I have a patch that right now is a big hammer:
 * Targets can have SIMD IEEE compliant or not (instead of fine
grained choosing which part).
 * Any FP arithmetic / cast operation with UnsafeAlgebra will trigger
a "potentially unsafe" flag in the vectorizer.
 * In the end, if the SIMD unit is not IEEE compliant and there is any
potentially unsafe operations, avoid that loop.

I just need to create some more tests to submit.

The problems I can see in your case are:
 * Both scalar and vector units have problems with denormals, so my
isSIMDIEEE() is not enough.
   - To fix this, you can add isVFPIEEE(), but we may find a better solution?
 * Your optimisation is basic-block based, not loop based, so we'd
have to add the same check to SLP.
   - SLP deals with both SIMD and VFP units, so we would need the
additional flag anyway.
   - This will be my next step.
 * Other passes already have access to the TTI, so they can use those
flags to avoid strength reduction, combine, etc. in those cases.

I don't think we need to create a fine grained solution right now,
since we don't have examples with different behaviour.

Would that work for you?

cheers,
--renato