Whole Wavefront Wode (WWM) is similar to WQM, except that all of the
lanes are always enabled, regardless of control flow. This is required
for implementing wavefront reductions in non-uniform control flow, where
we need to use the inactive lanes to propagate intermediate results, so
they need to be enabled. We need to propagate WWM to uses (unless
they're explicitly marked as exact) so that they also propagate
intermediate results correctly. We do the analysis and exec mask munging
during the WQM pass, since there are interactions with WQM for things
that require both WQM and WWM. For simplicity, WWM is entirely
block-local -- blocks are never WWM on entry or exit of a block, and WWM
is not propagated to the block level. This means that computations
involving WWM cannot involve control flow, but we only ever plan to use
WWM for a few limited purposes (none of which involve control flow)
anyways.
Shaders can ask for WWM using the @llvm.amdgcn.wwm intrinsic. There
isn't yet a way to turn WWM off -- that will be added in a future
change.
Finally, it turns out that turning on inactive lanes causes a number of
problems with register allocation. While the best long-term solution
seems like teaching LLVM's register allocator about predication, for now
we need to add some hacks to prevent ourselves from getting into trouble
due to constraints that aren't currently expressed in LLVM. For the gory
details, see the comments at the top of SIFixWWMLiveness.cpp.