Remove RA from reserved register list, so we could use it as callee saved register
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We discussed this in the RISC-V meeting on 19 Sep 2019.
- Pros: GCC for RISC-V and LLVM for ARM and AArch64 seem to do the same. It can help in situations with particularly bad register pressure requirements.
- Cons: It can make debugging a lot harder, though this seems not to be an issue in GDB for RISC-V.
I think we don't want to have yet another configuration flag to control this.
It would be good to see some performance comparison, but I realise you may not be able to release internal benchmarks, and we have no public benchmarking system for RISC-V.
I can't reveal the detail of the benchmark, but the most significant case improve about 1%. It might be reasonable to free RA for register allocation since most of the backend already do so.
In CoreMark-Pro, when the execution model is 1 instr == 1 cycle, with this patch the results I get is that sha-test improves by +1.43% in RV64 (GC, LP64D). For all other sub-benchmarks the performance differences round to 0.00%. There's no change to sha-test in RV32 before and after the patch.
We had a discussion internally at lowRISC about this. I no longer think that debuggability is a concern, as FP/CFI-info is far more important than the return address. Alex has raised that preserving RA is useful for some lightweight tracing applications, but I feel that can be solved with the implementation of -ffixed-x1 (D67185).
With that in mind, we're happy to approve this patch, pending the following:
Please can you rebase it? It applies, but tests fail. Looks like a simple update caused by a change to the materialisation of the address of var.