[LLVMdev] [DRAFT] LLVM 1.7 release announcement notes [DRAFT]

Chris Lattner
2006-04-14T03:43:57Z

Hi Everyone,

Here are my notes on the LLVM 1.7 release, which will go into the final
release announcement.  As Tanya mentioned, it has been far too long since
the last release, and there have been a lot of CVS commits since Novemeber.
:)  I went through them all and pulled out some of the major improvements,
which I've listed below.  I'm certain that I have forgotten some things,
so
please let me know if I have and I'm happy to add it.  I'm going to
start
working on the release notes now.

If you're interested in helping out with the release, please take a look at
Tanya's release plan:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-April/005480.html

In particular, we will have tarballs ready real soon now, and we'd
appreciate it if people could give them a try and report back as soon as
possible (include platform, OS, system compiler version, and whether you
tested a debug or release build of LLVM).  Our goal is to get testing done
by April 18th.

Finally, if you'd like to check in something to the release branch, please
check it into mainline CVS first, then ask Tanya if it is okay to check it
into the branch.  Assuming it's ok, either you or she can pull it in.

Thanks all,

-Chris

----------------- 8< ----------------- 8< --------------------

<will insert overview blurb here> Big new things: llvm-gcc4, new sparc
backend, Generic vector/SSE/Altivec support, X86 Scalar SSE support,
debugging support, many target-independent codegen improvements, inline asm,
llvm.org/web-reg.


Core LLVM IR Improvements:

*  The LLVM IR now has full support for representing target-specific
    inline assembly code, as general as GCC's inline assembly.
*  Rob Bocchino added new LLVM insertelement and extractelement
    instructions, for accessing/updating scalar elements of a vector.
*  LLVM now has a new shufflevector instruction, for permuting the
    elements of a vector. http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#vectorops
*  LLVM now supports first class global ctor/dtor initialization lists, no
    longer forcing targets to use "__main".
*  LLVM supports assigning globals and functions to a particular section
    in the result executable.


LLVM Intrinsic Improvements:

*  Adding target-specific intrinsics to LLVM is now really easy: entries
    are added to .td files and necessary support code is generated from it.
*  Reid contributed flexible support for "autoupgrading" intrinsics.
This
    is useful when we decide to change an intrinsic in a new releases of
    LLVM: .ll and .bc files from old releases get upgraded to the new form. *
Andrew added support for a new LLVM "readcyclecounter" intrinsic, for
    accessing low-level target timing interfaces.
*  LLVM now supports llvm.stacksave/llvm.stackrestore intrinsics, for
    proper C99 Variable Length Array support.
*  Reid changed many intrinsics to have fixed types instead of being
    overloaded based on type.


Mid-Level Analysis and Transformation Improvements:

*  The -loop-unswitch pass has had several bugs fixed, has several new
    features, and is enabled by default now.
*  Evan improved the loop strength reduction pass to use a parameterized
    target interface and to take advantage of strided loads on targets
    that support them (e.g. X86).
*  The -instcombine pass has a framework and implementation for simplifying
    code based on whether computed bits are demanded or not, based on
    Nate's design and implementation in the code generator.
*  Nate reimplemented post-dominator analysis using the Lengauer and
    Tarjan algorithm, replacing the old iterative implementation.  On one
    extreme example his implementation is 40x faster than the old one
    (PR681) and uses far less memory.
*  Daniel Berlin contributed an ET-Forest implementation, which
    replaces the old LLVM DominatorSet with a far more efficient data
    structure (in both space and time).
*  Andrew wrote a new "reg2mem" which transforms an LLVM function so
that
    there are no SSA values live across basic blocks.
*  The -scalarrepl pass can now promote simple unions to registers.
*  The inliner can now inline functions that have dynamic 'alloca'
    instructions in them (without increasing stack usage).
*  The -reassociate pass knows how to factor expressions in several ways,
    e.g. turning (A*A+A*B) into (A*(A+B)) and (X+X+Y+Y) into ((X+Y) << 1)
*  Saem Ghani contributed support to allow different implementations of
    the abstract callgraph interface, e.g., based on pointer analysis.


Debugging Support Improvements:

*  Jim implemented almost complete debugging support in the llvm-gcc 4.0
    front-end and the x86/powerpc darwin backends.  This includes line
    number information, variable information, function information, frame
    information etc.  This is a huge leap in debug support over previous
    releases, the only major missing piece is support for debugging
    optimized code.
*  Jim added support to the C backend for turning line number information
    into #line directives in the output C file.
*  Jim expanded http://llvm.org/docs/SourceLevelDebugging.html and filled
    in many details.


Target-Independent Code Generator Improvements:

*  Nate contributed the foundation of vector support including instruction
    selection and tblgen pieces.
*  Evan contributed a new target-independent bottom-up list scheduler.
*  The new list scheduler was enhanced to support top-down scheduling and
    to support target-specific priority functions and resource conflict
    detectors.
*  The code generator now supports many simple inline assembly
    expressions, though there are still cases that are not handled.  If you
    get errors or assertions using inline assembly, please file a bugzilla
    bug.  Inline assembly is not currently supported in the JIT or C backend.
*  Evan contributed extensive additions to 'tblgen', the code
    generator generator, providing more expressive .td files.
*  Nate integrated switch statement lowering directly into the
    SelectionDAG machinery, instead of depending on the lower-switch pass
    to reduce them to branches.  In the process, he improved to algorithm
    to avoid emiting some dead comparisons.
*  Evan significantly improved SelectionDAG support for chain and flag
    handling, and added support for describing these nodes in .td files.
*  Nate contributed a framework and implementation for simplifying code
    based on whether computed bits are demanded or not, which works well on
    bitfield manipulations and other bit-twiddling code, particularly for
    removing unneeded sign extensions.
*  Evan added support for adding per-instruction predicates that
    enable/disable specific instructions.  This is used to disable
    instructions that are not supported by specific subtargets, etc.
*  LLC has a new -fast option, instructing it to generate code quickly
    instead of optimizing the generated code.
*  Many compile-time speedups in the code generator.
*  The target-independent AsmPrinter module has many new features, such as
    support for emitting ".asciz" instead of ".ascii" when
possible,
    support for .zerofill, support for targets that accept quoted labels,
    etc, and it reduces the amount of target-specific code that needs to
    be written.
*  Nate added support for byte-swap and bit rotate nodes.
*  The legalizer pass is now non-iterative (==faster), more simple, and
    several nasty libcall insertion bugs are now fixed.
*  The register spiller is better at optimizing inserted spill code.
*  Evan modified the instruction selector generator to produce code that
    doesn't run out of stack space when compiled with GCC 4.x.
*  Evan added support for lowering memset/memcpy with small fixed sizes
    into discrete load and store instructions.
*  LLVM can now inline the copysign C99/FORTRAN functions.


X86-Specific Code Generator Improvements:

*  Evan added a new DAG-DAG instruction selector for X86,
    replacing the 'pattern' selector.
*  Evan added Scalar SSE support, which provides significantly
    better performance than the LLVM FP stack code.
*  Evan added a register-pressure reducing scheduler priority function,
    which is now used by default on X86.
*  Evan added support for -fpic and -static codegen on Darwin.
*  Evan added initial support for subtargets in the X86 backend, including
    a broad range of -mcpu=* values.
*  Evan improved the loop strength reduction on X86, and it is now turned
    on by default.
*  Evan added support for generation of SSE3 instructions (e.g. fisttp) on
    subtargets that support it.


PowerPC-Specific Code Generator Improvements:

*  Full support for the Altivec instruction set, accessible with the GCC
    generic vector extension and the altivec.h intrinsics (llvmgcc4 only),
    including support for -faltivec and -maltivec.
*  Nate greatly simplified the PowerPC branch selector, making it more
    aggressive and removing support code from the target-independent code
    in the process.
*  Support for -static and -fpic codegen on Darwin.
*  Many improvements in the generated code.


IA64-Specific Code Generator Improvements:

*  Duraid transitioned the code generator to the new DAG-to-DAG isel
    framework, which is more reliable and produces better code.
*  The Itanium backend now has a bundling pass, which improves performance
    by ~10% and reduces code size.  Bundling can be improved in the future
    by implementing a hazard recognizer for the scheduler to build better
    bundles.
*  LLVM has been built with the HP aCC compiler and stdcxx, the Apache C++
    Standard Library (see http://incubator.apache.org/stdcxx/ ). While
    building with compilers other than g++ is not supported, doing so
    should now be more straightforward.


Alpha-specific Code Generator Improvements:

*  Andrew rewrote the alpha instruction selector to use the new DAG-to-DAG
    instruction selection framework.
*  Andrew fixed several bugs handling weak and linkonce linkage.


SPARC-Specific Code Generator Improvements:

*  LLVM 1.7 includes a completely rewritten SPARC backend.  This backend
    has several advantages over the previous LLVM SPARC backend, and will
    replace it entirely in LLVM 1.8.  This backend is about 3700 lines of
    code (making it a good reference for new targets), supports Sparc V8
    and V9 instructions, and produces code that is slightly better than GCC
    on SPEC2000.  For more details:
    http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-February/005228.html


llvm-gcc 4.0:

*  llvm-gcc4 is a new C/C++/ObjC/ObjC++ front-end, rewritten from scratch,
    based on GCC 4.0.1.  This front-end is currently only supported on
    Mac OS/X PowerPC and Intel systems, but we hope to extend support to
    the other LLVM-supported systems in the future.
*  Supports for the GCC "section", "used" and
"align" attributes.
*  Full support for the GCC generic vector extension.
*  Full support for PowerPC/Altivec and IA32/SSE intrinsics.
*  Full support for GCC inline assembly (note that there are currently
    some limitations in the code generator though).
*  Full support for C99 Variable Length Arrays.
*  llvm-gcc 4.0 fixes a broad range of long term bugs that have afflicted
    llvm-gcc3 in areas such as ABI compliance, union layout, and bitfield
    handling.  There are 28 bugs dependent on http://llvm.org/PR498.


Other Improvements:

*  The primary LLVM domain name is now http://llvm.org/.
*  Web form registration is no longer required to download LLVM releases.
*  Eric Kidd contributed the llvm-config utility, to make it easier to
    build and link programs against the LLVM libraries:
      http://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/html/llvm-config.html
*  Saem Ghani extended the PostOrderIterator class to permit external
    storage.
*  The nightly tester output now color codes performance deltas to make it
    easier to read at a glance.
*  Reid added support for multiple -rpath options to the linker.
*  Reid finished consolidating the host specific code into the libsystem
    library.
*  Reid removed use of fork() from bugpoint, allowing it to work on Win32
    systems.
*  Andrew improved bugpoint's handling of dynamically loaded
    optimization plugins.
*  Morten contributed patches for better support of Visual C++ 2005.

In addition to the new features and infrastructure we have built, we
have also fixed many minor bugs and have made many small optimization
improvements.  LLVM 1.7 is the clearly our best release yet, and upgrading
from a previous release is highly recommended.

As usual, if you have any questions or comments about LLVM or any of the
features in this status update, please feel free to contact the LLVMdev
mailing list (llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu)!

Finally, here is the previous status report, the LLVM 1.6 announcement:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2005-November/000017.html

-Chris

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