[llvm-dev] Handling far branches with fixups or ELF relocs

[Denis Steckelmacher via llvm-dev]

Hello,

I'm working on an LLVM backend for an experimental microprocessor. Work 
is going on nicely, and I've until now found the answer to all my 
questions directly in the LLVM source code, or in the documentation.

However, I'm having problems with the AsmBackend class and the handling 
of fixups.

The processor I'm working with has a single conditional branch 
instruction, JCC, that takes an IP-relative 9-bit immediate offset as 
operand. A second version of the instruction takes a register as operand 
and can therefore jump to any 32-bit address.

In AsmBackend, there are methods for relaxing instructions, that I 
wanted to use to replace "JCC imm9" instructions with a sequence of 
instructions that jumps further. However, I have two questions:

- relaxInstruction does not seem to be able to replace one instruction 
with a sequence of instructions
- I've looked at many other LLVM backends (AVR, ARC, ARM, MIPS and 
RISC-V), and none of them really seem to do interesting things in 
relaxInstruction. ARM for instance relaxes Thumb instructions to normal 
instructions, and RISC-V relaxes compressed instructions to normal ones 
too. But in both cases, even the normal instructions have limited range, 
for which there is an assertion, but no "solution" for when a branch 
exceeds the range of the instruction.

It therefore seems that the problem of "conditional branches that jump 
too far" is solved elsewhere, but I could not find that location. I 
looked at LLD, and I've seen that RISC-V has some code there (related to 
the PLT) that produces sequences of instructions, but not the other targets.

So, what would be the best way to change "JCC imm9" instructions to 
something else when a branch has to jump further than 256 instructions 
before or after the current one?

Best regards,
Denis Steckelmacher