[llvm-dev] RFC: Adding bit to register MachineOperands to allow post-RA register renaming

[Quentin Colombet via llvm-dev]

Hi Geoff,

The principle sounds reasonable but it raises the question of proper APIs to query that. E.g., when I am looking at a use, how would we know that this is okay to rename? In other words, what API do we provide for such use cases.

Also, what do we do with registers that don’t have definition? For instance, a function live-ins register, a reserved register, and so on.

Cheers,
-Quentin

> On Oct 25, 2017, at 10:27 AM, Geoff Berry <gberry at codeaurora.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Currently, changing register assignments of definitions after register allocation is not safe because there is no way to know which register definitions were physical registers before RA (e.g. to meet ABI or ISA constraints) and thus should not be changed.  I'd like to propose adding a bit to MachineOperand (by overloading the meaning of the IsKill bit for defs, so no extra storage would be required), that tracks whether a given register definition was a virtual register before RA.  I'll throw out 'IsRenameable' for a potential name.
> 
> Register definitions created with virtual registers would have this bit set.  This bit should be verifiable until after RA.  Register definitions created after RA (presumably with physical registers) would not have this bit set.  I believe the only potential for this bit to be set incorrectly (and not be caught be verification) would be if a post-RA pass was already renaming a register definition from a previously virtual register to a previously non-virtual register, which would arguably be a bug already.
> 
> We have encountered several potential uses for this bit.  For example, the MachineCopyPropagation changes I have been working on to forward register COPYs would likely be greatly simplified if this bit were available.  Other passes, like AArch64LoadStoreOptimizer, which run post-RA so as not to overly-restrict the register allocator, could be made to catch more cases if renaming of load instructions could be done safely.
> 
> -- 
> Geoff Berry
> Employee of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc.
> Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. as an affiliate of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.  Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is a member of the Code Aurora Forum, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.