PowerPC supports pre-increment load/store instructions (except for Altivec/VSX
vector load/stores). Using these on embedded cores can be very important, but
most loops are not naturally set up to use them. We can often change that,
however, by placing loops into a non-canonical form. Generically, this means
transforming loops like this:
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
array[i] = c;
to look like this:
T *p = array[-1];
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
*++p = c;
the key point is that addresses accessed are pulled into dedicated PHIs and
"pre-decremented" in the loop preheader. This allows the use of pre-increment
load/store instructions without loop peeling.
A target-specific late IR-level pass (running post-LSR), PPCLoopPreIncPrep, is
introduced to perform this transformation. I've used this code out-of-tree for
generating code for the PPC A2 for over a year. Somewhat to my surprise,
running the test suite + externals on a P7 with this transformation enabled
showed no performance regressions, and one speedup:
External/SPEC/CINT2006/483.xalancbmk/483.xalancbmk
-2.32514% +/- 1.03736%
So I'm going to enable it on everything for now. I was surprised by this
because, on the POWER cores, these pre-increment load/store instructions are
cracked (and, thus, harder to schedule effectively). But seeing no regressions,
and feeling that it is generally easier to split instructions apart late than
it is to combine them late, this might be the better approach regardless.
In the future, we might want to integrate this functionality into LSR (but
currently LSR does not create new PHI nodes, so (for that and other reasons)
significant work would need to be done).
git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@228328 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
The existing code provided for specifying a global loop alignment preference.
However, the preferred loop alignment might depend on the loop itself. For
recent POWER cores, loops between 5 and 8 instructions should have 32-byte
alignment (while the others are better with 16-byte alignment) so that the
entire loop will fit in one i-cache line.
To support this, getPrefLoopAlignment has been made virtual, and can be
provided with an optional MachineLoop* so the target can inspect the loop
before answering the query. The default behavior, as before, is to return the
value set with setPrefLoopAlignment. MachineBlockPlacement now queries the
target for each loop instead of only once per function. There should be no
functional change for other targets.
git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@225117 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
Most modern PowerPC cores prefer that functions and loops start on
16-byte-aligned boundaries (*), so instruct block placement, etc. to make this
happen. The branch selector has also been adjusted so account for the extra
nops that might now be inserted before loop headers.
(*) Some cores actually prefer other alignments for small loops, but that will
be addressed in a follow-up commit.
git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@225115 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
