[llvm-dev] How to change CLang struct alignment behaviour?

[Tim Northover via llvm-dev]

Hi Joan,

On Mon, 13 May 2019 at 07:53, Joan Lluch <joan.lluch at icloud.com> wrote:
> The reason I want structs to be aligned/padded to 2 bytes is because my architecture only has 16 bit operations. I can read (sign and zero extended) and write (truncated) 8 bit data from/to memory, but all intermediate operations in registers are performed in 16 bit registers.

This is very normal. Mostly it's at 32-bits rather than 16, but it
applies to basically every RISC architecture so LLVM should handle it
well without adjusting the alignment requirements of types.

> This causes LLVM to generate odd tricks such as shifts and byte-swaps, when trying to replace struct ‘memcpy’s by word sized load/store instructions.

That sounds odd, as if you've not taught the backend to use those
8-bit loads and stores so it's trying to emulate them with word-sized
ones (early Alpha chips genuinely didn't have byte access so had to do
that kind of thing). You can (and should) probably fix that.

Also, there are a few customization points where you can control how
memcpy is implemented. The function "findOptimalMemOpLowering" lets
you control the type used for the loads and stores, and
MaxStoresPerMemcpy controls when LLVM will call the real memcpy. If
you want even more control you can implement EmitTargetCodeForMemcpy
to do the whole thing.

Cheers.

Tim.