The recent fix for mul_widen_cost revealed an interesting
quirk of ira/reload register allocation on x86_64. As shown in
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2020-August/551648.html
for gcc.target/i386/pr71321.c we generate the following code that
performs unnecessary register shuffling.
movl $-51, %edx
movl %edx, %eax
mulb %dil
Various discussions in bugzilla seem to point to reload preferring
not to load constants directly into CLASS_LIKELY_SPILLED_P registers.
Whatever the cause, one solution (workaround), that doesn't involve
rewriting a register allocator, is to use peephole2 to spot this
wierdness and eliminate it. With this peephole2 the above three
instructions (from pr71321.c) are replaced with:
movl $-51, %eax
mulb %dil
2020-08-12 Roger Sayle <roger@nextmovesoftware.com>
Uroš Bizjak <ubizjak@gmail.com>
gcc/ChangeLog
* config/i386/i386.md (peephole2): Reduce unnecessary
register shuffling produced by register allocation.
operands[2] = gen_rtx_REG (GET_MODE (operands[0]), FLAGS_REG);
ix86_expand_clear (operands[1]);
})
+
+;; Reload dislikes loading constants directly into class_likely_spilled
+;; hard registers. Try to tidy things up here.
+(define_peephole2
+ [(set (match_operand:SWI 0 "general_reg_operand")
+ (match_operand:SWI 1 "x86_64_general_operand"))
+ (set (match_operand:SWI 2 "general_reg_operand")
+ (match_dup 0))]
+ "peep2_reg_dead_p (2, operands[0])"
+ [(set (match_dup 2) (match_dup 1))])
\f
;; Misc patterns (?)