How can I output assembly comments from emitPrologue()?

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1

Dear all,

I am looking to output assembly comments in my emitPrologue() function, just for my own readability. Searching for a way to do this found me this thread - http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/043722.html, which says that the best way to output comments from somewhere like emitPrologue() is to:

  1. Create an MDString for the comment.
  2. Attach it to an LLVM instruction using setMetadata().
  3. Add a new member to MachineInstr to hold the metadata, and attach it when converting LLVM instructions.
  4. Update AsmPrinter to read off the metadata and output it as an assembly comment.
    Is this the only (and correct) way to do this?

If so, I am having trouble attaching the MDString to an instruction. I am using BuildMI to create my instruction, which only seems to have an “addMetadata()” function rather than “setMetadata()”, and which takes an MDNode instead of an MDString. I attempted to do this as follows:

void XXXFrameLowering::emitPrologue(MachineFunction &MF) const {
…

Value* end_prologue_comment = MDString::get(getGlobalContext(), “end of prologue”);

BuildMI(MBB, MBBI, dl, TII.get(Target::AnInstr), Target::R1).addMetadata(cast(end_prologue_comment));

}

However, it seems an MDString cannot be case to an MDNode this way. How do I go about turning that MDString into an MDNode, and once done how do I add the new member to MachineInstr and attach the metadata to it?

Thanks,
Stephen

2

So, an update. I have managed to generate comments, although it does create a non-existent instruction. My method is as follows (and I would appreciate any comments on how to do it “better”, although note that this won’t make it into the final code :).)

  1. I declared a “fake” instruction type to hold comments, ala:

class FakeInst<dag outs, dag ins, string asmstr, list pattern> : Instruction {
field bits<32> Inst;

let Namespace = “XXX”
let Inst{31-0} = 0;

dag OutOperandList = outs;
dag InOperandList = ins;
let AsmString = asmstr;
let Pattern = pattern;

}

  1. I then defined a comment instruction, ala:

def COMMENT : FakeInst<(outs), (ins Reg:$fake), “; $fake”, >;

  1. I added the following to printOperand(…) in XXXAsmPrinter.cpp:

switch (MO.getType()) {

…

case MachineOperand::MO_Metadata:
O << cast(MO.getMetadata()->getOperand(0))->getString();
break;

…
}

  1. Finally, whenever I needed to emit comments I call the following:

MDNode* comment = MDNode::get(getGlobalContext(), ArrayRef<Value*>(MDString::get(getGlobalContext(), “COMMENT HERE”)));
BuildMI(MBB, MBBI, dl, TII.get(XXX::COMMENT)).addMetadata(comment);

So, this seems to work, although it will create an empty instruction (I think). That could probably be cleaned up before MC emission, but I would really just remove the comments anyway. Any suggestions on a better way to do this (or a pointer to some obvious existing solution!) welcome :).

Stephen

3

You don't need to create new fake instruction. You can attach your comment to any existing machine instruction.

  MI->addOperand(MachineOperand::CreateMetadata(comment));