bytecodealliance / bytecodealliance/regalloc2

Modeling subregister aliasing

Abierto
#247 3 comentarios 0 reacciones 0 asignados Ver en GitHub
Lenguaje dominante
Rust
Estrellas
265
Forks
53
Métricas de merge de PR
Sin PR fusionados en 30 d

Descripción

I’m experimenting with using regalloc2 for a cranelift backend targeting a old Z80 8-bit CPU with hierarchical registers —
where two small registers can form one larger register, and vice versa:

B + C = BC (16-bit)
D + E = DE (16-bit)
H + L = HL (16-bit)

Here’s the challenge:

Some 16-bit instructions can use either BC or DE.
When BC is used, both B and C become clobbered.
When DE is used, D and E are clobbered instead.

The 8-bit registers are individually addressable, but they also participate in 16-bit operations as pairs.

The problem is that regalloc2 assumes all physical registers in a class are disjoint,
and clobber sets must be fixed before allocation.
That makes it unclear how to express a relationship like “BC aliases both B and C” or “writing BC invalidates B and C.”

LLVM handles this using register units and subregisters, where overlapping registers share “register units”
and the allocator tracks partial definitions and interference on that level.
regalloc2, however, currently has no notion of aliasing or register overlap.

So I’m wondering:

Is there any way to model such subregister aliasing with the current regalloc2 API?

Would it make sense to support aliasing PRegs or register subsets (similar to LLVM’s register units / subregister indices)?

Or is the current expectation that these aliasing relationships be handled entirely outside the allocator,
e.g. by inserting explicit moves, using fixed constraints, or splitting live ranges manually?

Guía de contribución

No hay ninguna guía de contribución indexada para este repositorio

Evaluación

Este issue todavía no se ha evaluado.

Recibe los nuevos issues en tu correo

Un resumen breve de issues de GitHub para principiantes.