Re: [RFC] Improve Tree-SSA if-conversion - convergence of efforts

["Daniel Berlin" <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On 7/31/07, Tehila Meyzels <TEHILA@il.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to bring up on the list a discussion that a bunch of people (most
> of those CC-ed above) started at the GCC Summit:
>
> Lately, there were few efforts, that are not necessarily related to each
> other, but are all relevant to if-conversion.
> Each of them has its own restriction, like a specific control-flow, target
> dependent information, permission to transform speculative loads, etc.
>
> Few patches that I'm aware of are:
> 1.  Conditional store sinking, by Michael Matz:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2007-04/msg00724.html
>
> 2. If -conversion for multiple IF_THEN_ELSE clauses, by Victor Kaplansky:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2006-05/msg00265.html
> Also mentioned here:  http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/AutovectBranchOptimizations
> (2.3.3)
>
> 3.  (unconditional) Store sinking (4.1.1 based), by Revital Eres and Victor
> Kaplansky:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2006-05/msg00265.html (same patch as
> previous)
> Also mentioned here:  http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/AutovectBranchOptimizations
> (2.3.2)
>
> 4. Conditional load hoisting (4.1.1 based), by myself:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2007-07/msg02168.html
>
> 5. Maybe more?
>
> You're welcome to share your/others related works here...
>
>
> I'd like to suggest to converge all these efforts into a single improved
> tree-level if-conversion pass (i.e., on the top of tree-if-conv.c).
> Currently, the tree-level if-conversion pass is quite limited in several
> ways, and mostly with respect to handling of loads/stores (it basically
> doesn't handle them), but not only.
>
> There are several reasons why to store-sinking and load-hoisting should be
> combined with the if-conversion pass:
> 1. Store-sinking/load hoisting effect one another and they both can create
> new opportunities for if-conversion (not only in vectorizable loops, for
> example).

>     Currently, load-store motion pass happens too late and thus don't help
> the (tree-ssa) if-converter.
> 2. Store-sinking/load hoisting may have an overhead and may degrade
> performance unless the relevant conditional branch gets if-converted.

I agree with you for conditional stores/loads.

The unconditional store/load stuff, however, is exactly what
tree-ssa-sink was meant to do, and belongs there (this is #3 above).
I'm certainly going to fight tooth and nail against trying to shoehorn
unconditional store sinking into if-conv.