Previously, we would sign-extend non-boolean negative constants and
zero-extend otherwise. This was problematic for PHI instructions with
negative values that had a type with bitwidth less than that of the
register used for materialization.
More specifically, ComputePHILiveOutRegInfo() zero-extends (or
truncates to the bitwidth of destination-type) the constants present
in a PHI node, and afterwards deduces the known bits.
For example, previously we would materialize an i16 -4 with the
following instruction:
addiu $r, $zero, -4
The register would end-up with the 32-bit 2's complement representation
of -4. However, ComputePHILiveOutRegInfo() would generate a constant
with the upper 16-bits set to zero. The SelectionDAG builder would use
that information to generate an AzzertZero node that would remove any
subsequent trunc & zero_extend nodes.
In theory, we should modify ComputePHILiveOutRegInfo() to consult
target-specific hooks about the way they prefer to materialize the
given constants. However, git-blame reports that this specific code
has not been touched since 2011 and it seems to be working well for every
target so far.