Re: Unrolling and spilling

"Stephan Ceram" <linuxkaffee_@_gmx.net> wrote in message
> In many compiler books and papers you read that loop unrolling
> possibly increases register pressure that leads to extra spill code. I
> don't see the reason how this can happen. When you perform unrolling
> at assembly level, the loop bodies are just replicated, so the
> register life ranges are not really increased. Also, when unrolling is
> done at the source code, I don't really see a reason why the register
> allocation should add more spill instructions. More spilling would
> mean that you have a change in the life ranges of the variables that
> adversely influenced the interference graph. But why should I get
> more conflicting life ranges after unrolling?
>
> The only reason I see are instruction scheduling techniques that might
> mix up life ranges but the literature does not mention these
> optimizations in context of spilling and unrolling.
>


I wrote a compiler and I don't see why this should be the case...


any spilling that would occur as a result of unrolling I would think would
also occur as a result of having had the loop.




but, then again, I also wrote a fairly stupid compiler, which tends to spill
its registers whenever running across a label or jump (the register
allocator/... is stupid, and so will not bother to take control flow and
similar into account, but will rather just spill any registers in order to
make sure everything is in a consistent state prior to either entering the
label, or initiating the jump).


so, in my case, unrolling would actually help, as since there is no longer a
need for labels and conditional jumps (resulting from the looping code), it
may be able to avoid spilling registers...




then again, I didn't read any of the existing literature prior to originally
writing my compiler, rather I just used the powers of past experience and
programmer intuition.


or such...

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