RS6000 call pattern clobbers
Richard Kenner
kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu
Mon Feb 26 12:31:00 GMT 2007
> The patterns clobber and use the rs6000 link register as a match_scratch
> with constraint of the link register class:
>
> (clobber (match_scratch:SI 0 "=l"))
>
> instead of clobbering the link register hard register directly in the
> early insn generation. This style dates to the original rs6000 port. A
> naked use that starts as a pseudo causes problems for dataflow.
>
> Do you remember why you wrote the call patterns this way? Was
> there a problem with reload and clobbers of hard registers in a register
> class containing a single register or some other historical quirk?
I think the former. I no longer remember the details, but if you had
a clobber of a hard reg, there were a number of things that such a hard
reg couldn't be used for (this is where the details are murky) and in order
to avoid that problem a match_scratch was used to delay the explicit hard
register usage as long as possible.
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