Re: [Aarch64] Vector Function Application Binary Interface Specification for OpenMP

[Richard Sandiford <richard.sandiford@linaro.org>]

Steve Ellcey <sellcey@cavium.com> writes:
> On Wed, 2018-05-16 at 17:30 +0100, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote:
>> On 16/05/18 17:21, Steve Ellcey wrote:
>> > 
>> > It doesn't look like GCC has any existing mechanism for having different
>> > sets of caller saved/callee saved registers depending on the function
>> > attributes of the calling or called function.
>> > 
>> > Changing what registers a callee function saves and restores shouldn't
>> > be too difficult since that can be done when generating the prologue
>> > and epilogue code but changing what registers a caller saves/restores
>> > when doing the call seems trickier.  The macro
>> > TARGET_HARD_REGNO_CALL_PART_CLOBBERED doesn't know anything about the
>> > function being called.  It returns true/false depending on just the
>> > register number and mode.
>> > 
>> > Steve Ellcey
>> > sellcey@cavium.com
>> > 
>> 
>> Actually, we can.  See, for example, the attribute((pcs)) for the ARM
>> port.  I think we could probably handle this automagically for the SVE
>> vector calling convention in AArch64.
>> 
>> R.
>
> Interesting, it looks like one could use aarch64_emit_call to emit
> extra use_reg / clobber_reg instructions but in this case we want to
> tell the caller that some registers are not being clobbered by the
> callee.  The ARM port does not
> define TARGET_HARD_REGNO_CALL_PART_CLOBBERED and that seemed like one
> of the most problamatic issues with Aarch64.  Maybe we would have to
> undefine this for aarch64 and use explicit clobbers to say what
> floating point registers / vector registers are clobbered for each
> call?  I wonder how that would affect register allocation.

TARGET_HARD_REGNO_CALL_PART_CLOBBERED is the only current way
of saying that an rtl instruction preserves the low part of a
register but clobbers the high part.  We would need something like
Alan H's CLOBBER_HIGH patches to do it using explicit clobbers.

Another approach would be to piggy-back on the -fipa-ra infrastructure
and record that vector PCS functions only clobber Q0-Q7.  If -fipa-ra
knows that a function doesn't clobber Q8-Q15 then that should override
TARGET_HARD_REGNO_CALL_PART_CLOBBERED.  (I'm not sure whether it does
in practice, but it should :-)  And if it doesn't that's a bug that's
worth fixing for its own sake.)

Thanks,
Richard