llvm dev - Jan 2016 - [GlobalISel] A Proposal for global instruction selection

Hi David,

I had a quick look at the inttoptr/ptrtoint thing for GlobalISel and unless I am
mistaken the semantic you want for such instructions do not match what the
language reference says.

Indeed, you said that inttoptr instruction is not a no-op on your architecture,
whereas the language reference says:
“The ‘inttoptr‘ instruction converts value to type ty2 by applying either a zero
extension or a truncation depending on the size of the integer value. If value
is larger than the size of a pointer then a truncation is done. If value is
smaller than the size of a pointer then a zero extension is done. If they are
the same size, nothing is done (no-op cast).”

The bottom line is that IMHO, if you rely on inttoptr/ptrtoint instructions to
do the conversion from fat pointers to plain integers you are abusing the IR.
I plan to stick to the LLVM IR semantic for the generic opcode of GlobalISel and
thus, it does not seem useful to have INTTOPTR like nodes around.

For instance, AArch64 has the TBI feature to deal more efficiently with fat
pointer when accessing memory and the masking operations are explicitly set in
the LLVM IR and later combine with the memory accesses.

Anyhow, this is just a heads-up, we will see in due time what we can do here.

Cheers,
-Quentin
> On Nov 19, 2015, at 10:53 AM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at
cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 19 Nov 2015, at 18:07, Quentin Colombet <qcolombet at apple.com>
wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 19, 2015, at 9:50 AM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at
cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 19 Nov 2015, at 17:49, Quentin Colombet <qcolombet at
apple.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I must miss something, but I don’t get what is the problem of
lower the pointer to actual integer.
>>> 
>>> Pointers, in our architecture, are not integers.
>> 
>> Thanks for the clarifications.
>> 
>> So what you’re saying is that a inttoptr instruction is not a no-op on
your architecture, is that right?
> 
> Correct.
> 
>> Or it can be a no-op only if the consumer of the pointer values can be
done on the pointer register bank?
> 
> Yes (in some compilation models, we support 64-bit integers as pointers and
256-bit / 128-bit fat pointers, with the integer values being implicitly checked
against a large region identified by one of the fat pointer registers, giving a
coarse-grained sandbox that can communicate with the outside world via bounded
pointers).
> 
> We currently have entirely separate fat pointer and integer register banks,
though we’re investigating a mode where we’ll overlay the two on the same
register file (though they’ll likely treat some things as sub-registers.
> 
> It also means that address space casts are not a no-op for us, which I
believe is something that we share with some GPU ISAs (e.g. a 32-bit [or 16-bit]
local pointer cast to a 64-bit global address space is not a simple sign/zero
extension and so must be handled differently to an i32 -> i64 translation)
> 
>> Don’t know if that helps, but note that the registers are not typed,
they just have size. The operations are typed.
> 
> That’s fine, once you’ve assigned values to register banks.  The issue is
ensuring that we’re not throwing away the information that we need to do that
assignment in the translation from LLVM IR to the new machine IR (i.e. which
values are pointers, and which address space they are in).
> 
>> I am trying to understand the constraint to see how that would fit in
the framework. That being said, anything that you could do in SDag should be
possible as well in the new framework.
> 
> We currently add several new nodes to SDag: INTTOPTR, PTRTOINT, and PTRADD,
and a new iFATPTR MVT.  The last is somewhat problematic, as we really want to
have iFATPTR128 and iFATPTR256 (and, potentially, iFATPTR64 for an IoT/embedded
variant).
> 
> David
> 
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On 7 Jan 2016, at 19:47, Quentin Colombet <qcolombet at apple.com>
wrote:
> 
> Indeed, you said that inttoptr instruction is not a no-op on your
architecture, whereas the language reference says:
> “The ‘inttoptr‘ instruction converts value to type ty2 by applying either a
zero extension or a truncation depending on the size of the integer value. If
value is larger than the size of a pointer then a truncation is done. If value
is smaller than the size of a pointer then a zero extension is done. If they are
the same size, nothing is done (no-op cast).”
> 
> The bottom line is that IMHO, if you rely on inttoptr/ptrtoint instructions
to do the conversion from fat pointers to plain integers you are abusing the IR.
> 
I believe that this is somewhere where the IR specification needs to evolve. 
Currently, we have no in-tree architectures where pointers are not integers and
so that definition is appropriate.  Adding a new pair of IR instructions for
integer-to-pointer and pointer-to-integer conversions and not calling them
inttoptr / ptrtoint is likely to be far more confusing.

David

> On Jan 8, 2016, at 1:34 AM, David Chisnall via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> On 7 Jan 2016, at 19:47, Quentin Colombet <qcolombet at apple.com>
wrote:
>> 
>> Indeed, you said that inttoptr instruction is not a no-op on your
architecture, whereas the language reference says:
>> “The ‘inttoptr‘ instruction converts value to type ty2 by applying
either a zero extension or a truncation depending on the size of the integer
value. If value is larger than the size of a pointer then a truncation is done.
If value is smaller than the size of a pointer then a zero extension is done. If
they are the same size, nothing is done (no-op cast).”
>> 
>> The bottom line is that IMHO, if you rely on inttoptr/ptrtoint
instructions to do the conversion from fat pointers to plain integers you are
abusing the IR.
>> 
> 
> I believe that this is somewhere where the IR specification needs to
evolve.  Currently, we have no in-tree architectures where pointers are not
integers and so that definition is appropriate.  Adding a new pair of IR
instructions for integer-to-pointer and pointer-to-integer conversions and not
calling them inttoptr / ptrtoint is likely to be far more confusing.
I think this would deserve its own RFC email thread.

— 
Mehdi