[llvm-dev] Removing pointers from MCInstrDesc for less relocations

[Benjamin Kramer via llvm-dev]

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 5:35 AM, Nicolai Hähnle <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I noticed today that my libLLVM-3.9svn.so has a ~1.7MB .data.rel.ro segment
> - i.e. data that needs to be touched by the dynamic linker even though it's
> ultimately read-only, and data that cannot be shared between multiple
> processes using LLVM.
>
> It turns out that a solid ~1.3MB of that data is in the tablegen'd
> MCInstrDesc tables - there a pointers for ImplicitUses, ImplicitDefs, and
> OpInfo that need to be relocated.
>
> This can be fixed of course by having target-global arrays for those
> structures referenced by MCInstrInfo (and hence TargetInstrInfo), and only
> storing offsets into those global arrays in MCInstrDesc.
>
> The downside is that several relevant accessors need to be augmented with
> MCInstrInfo parameters, but in the long run it seems worth it to me.
>
> Any objections or suggestions? Is this something that people can agree on,
> i.e. do patches going in this direction have a good chance of being
> accepted?

Sounds good to me, I'm happy to accept any patch that reduces LLVM binary size
without sacrificing performance. Passing MCInstrInfo isn't a big deal.

Is moving ImplicitUses/ImplicitDefs/OpInfo enough to get all relocs
out of the instruction
tables? Then the compiler could put them into a read-only section and
we don't have to
page them in at startup anymore.