[llvm-dev] Branch relaxation at assembler level (RISCV)

[Paolo via llvm-dev]

On 04/12/18 21:13, Friedman, Eli wrote:
> On 12/3/2018 2:45 PM, Paolo via llvm-dev wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm trying to implement the same branch relaxation mechanism implemented
>> in CodeGen in the MC layer of RISCV.
>>
>>    beqz t1, L1
>>
>>    =>
>>
>>    bnez t1, L2
>>
>>    j L1
>>
>> That's because LLVM does not apply the CodeGen optimizations when
>> compiling directly from assembly code.
>>
>> What I'd like to do would be to add a pass that does that on the MC
>> instructions or at least to find a way to implement this relaxation in
>> the MC assembler.
>>
>> Any suggestions on where/how to do it? Or any existing fixes?
>
> The RISCV assembler already has code for similar transforms; see
> RISCVAsmBackend::mayNeedRelaxation and
> RISCVAsmBackend::relaxInstruction.  The only tricky bit is that the
> relaxation interface doesn't expect one instruction to be relaxed to
> two instructions... probably not too hard to change, though, if
> necessary.
>
> That said, I'm a little skeptical this is actually a good idea; the
> more "smart" the assembler is, the harder it becomes to understand
> what it's doing. No other in-tree target does this sort of transform.
>
> -Eli
>
Thank you Eli for the quick reply,

Well, I had seen the RISCVAsmBackend and yes, I agree it wouldn't be a
good idea to make it handle this niche issue.
We thought that we might work at the MC emission level and see what we
can do there.

Thanks
Paolo