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Re: RFC: Explicit move preference hints
On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 05:15:03PM +0000, Wilco Dijkstra wrote:
> Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 10:48:17AM +0000, Wilco Dijkstra wrote:
> > > The register allocator inserts move preferences when an instruction has
> > > one or more dead sources in add_insn_allocno_copies. If an instruction
> > > doesn't have a matching constraint (eg. "0"), then any dead source is treated
> > > as a copy with all destination registers with a low priority. In reality what
> > > appears to happen is that the first dead source is treated as a copy. This
> > > leads to non-intuitive allocations in eg. 4-register FMAs. Here you'd
> > > prefer to have the accumulator and destination to use the same register
> > > when possible: so fmadd d2, d0, d5, d2 instead of fmadd d0, d0, d5, d2.
> >
> > You could add a preferred alternative that uses "0" to such instruction
> > patterns, will that help?
>
> What is a preferred alternative? The current register allocator simply ignores
> any combination of "0r", "r0", ("r", "0") and ("0", "r") and just picks the most
> generic alternative. So we need a new way to specify a move preference
> which won't constrain the allocation ("0" would always force the preference but
> will also insert redundant moves which then cannot be removed later).
"0,r" might work, or "0,?r", or similar (alternatives have commas
between them).
Segher