Hi All, I am wondering if there is anyway we can prefer certain registers in register allocations. That is, I want to have some way of recording register allocation decisions (for loads in loop that are accessed in steps) and use this to influence register allocation of other loads (again that are accessed in steps).
This is for architectures (like falkor AArch64) that use hardware perefetchers that use signatures of the loads to lock into and tune prefetching parameters. Ideally, If the loads are from the same stream, they should have same signature and if they are from different stream, they should have different signature. Destination, base register and offset are used in the signature. Therefore, selecting different register can influence this. In LLVM, this is implemented as a machine specific pass that runs after register allocation. It then inserts mov instruction with scratch registers to manage this. We can do a machine reorg pass in gcc but detecting strided loads at that stage is not easy. I am trying to implement this in gcc and wondering what is the preferred and acceptable way to implement this. Any thoughts ? Thanks, Kugan
