Hello llvm-dev,
Our team is currently creating an LLVM backend for embedded systems. We're seeking for an advice on the best/correct way to implement our register classes in the Legalize Phase. As an overview, our backend has 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit register classes. Our instruction set consist mostly of 8-bit and 16-bit instructions. The 32-bit and 64-bit instructions are commonly used in memory access operations.
The LLVM Backend reference we used is the AVR. In their implementation, 8-bit and 16-bit register classes were added with the addRegisterClass function (They only have up to 16-bit registers) in their TargetLowering. With this, 32-bit and 64-bit operations are automatically split into its equivalent 8/16-bit operations in the DAG after the Legalize Phase.
For the LLVM Backend we are currently developing, in one hand, adding the 32-bit and 64-bit register classes would output DAG nodes containing 32/64-bit operations. This would require us to create pseudo instructions in the TableGen for expansion to its 8/16-bit equivalent operations. On the other hand, not adding these register classes would have the same behavior with the AVR.
We are unaware of the consequences of both cases. We have only tested this with load and store operations for now. We have not verified if the DAG output are also correct for other operations. What should we consider in deciding what to use in our implementation?
Thank you very much in advance for your efforts and help!
Best,
Igie
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I think you can make the 32bit and 64bit types legal (using addRegisterClass) and use setOperationAction(Expand) for all the operations for which you don’t have native support.
Hello Sebastien,
Thank you very much for the clarification. This would greatly help us in our development.
I have noticed that setOperationAction(Expand) does not always work, for these cases, does it automatically mean that setOperationAction(Custom) should be used or not necessarily?
Currently, we perform a pseudo instruction instead of setting it to custom.
For example in the case of a load/store, 8 bits and 16 bits load/store can be natively performed but for the 32 bits, we have to expand it into two 16 bits operations in a pseudo instruction. We have not yet implemented 64 bits load/store, should we continue using pseudo instruction for this considering that instead of expanding we need to load effective address from memory and perform load/store 64 bits register with the loaded effective address?
Again, thank you for your help!
Best,
Miguel
setOperationAction(Expand) won’t split any operations into smaller types. It just rewrites some operations in terms of other operations on the same type. And a lot of operations aren’t supported as you’ve noticed as there is no realistic way to do them using other operations on the same type
For integer operations in particular, operation legalization (LegalizeDAG) has limited support, yes. That isn’t really a fundamental limitation; the infrastructure is generally okay with rewriting operations to use different (legal) types. But in practice, we don’t support marking basic integer operations like “ADD/AND/OR/XOR” as Expand, and it would be painful to implement in SelectionDAG and DAGCombine because a bunch of places assume they’re legal. So in practice, a target that doesn’t have i32 “ADD” should not mark i32 as a legal type.
If the only “i32” operation the target has is load/store, I’d recommend modeling an “i32” load as a load of two i16 values. You can either build these using custom lowering in SelectionDAG, or merge adjacent loads after isel. Existing targets have instructions like this; for example, ldrd on ARM, ldp on AArch64.
-Eli