[llvm-dev] Register allocators and constrained classes at -O0

[Nagurne, James via llvm-dev]

Hi all, I've run into an issue involving the fast allocator and constrained register classes that I'm looking for pointers on.

Consider a target with a register store instruction using an addressing mode with register base and offset:
                *(base + index) = src;

This instruction may be modeled in tablegen with the operands: (outs) (ins REGCLASS:$src, REGCLASS:$base, REGCLASS_CONSTRAINED:$index)

In my particular case, REGCLASS contains 8 registers, R0-R7, and REGCLASS_CONSTRAINED has only 2, R0 and R1. The allocation order for REGCLASS is specifically set up to avoid R0 and R1 via an order that rotates the list left to (R2-R7, R0, R1).

In a piece of code at -O0, I'm at a point where I've allocated R2-R7, and the fast allocator sees a store of the form above. It chooses R0 and R1 for $src and $base. Because R0 and R1 are taken, $index can't be allocated at all, and the allocator emits an error.

I first thought that the backend should be able to prioritize the constrained register first and found the AllocationPriority field in tablegen, but then noted that it was only used in the greedy allocator. I then looked at the fast allocator and noted that it seems to have no method for the target to affect priority or ordering. This is probably by design, so I pose my conundrum to the community since I can't imagine that this hasn't come up at some point in the past.

My current options seem to be:

  *   Update REGCLASS to not contain R0 or R1 in the allocation order, but this seems like we'll end up spilling in cases where we really don't need to
  *   Run the greedy allocator at -O0. It seems like no other target does something like this currently
     *   NVPTX and WebAssembly override createTargetRegisterAllocator to return nullptr
     *   Overriding addRegAssignAndRewriteFast to just return addRegAssignAndRewriteOptimized seems to fix the allocation problem, but I wonder if there's a fundamental issue with how the target has been defined.
  *   Perhaps attempt to adapt the recently-committed staged-allocation mechanism from https://reviews.llvm.org/rGeebe841a47cb to allocate constrained registers first

Regards,
J.B. Nagurne
Code Generation
Texas Instruments
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