This patch is an attempt to introduce the minimum plumbing necessary to use IR-level fast-math-flags (FMF) in the backend along with one usage and test case (reciprocal estimate).
History:
- IR-level FMF was added around 2012: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2012-October/054999.html
- Integer IR optimization flags (nsw, nuw, exact) were extended to the backend in June 2014: http://reviews.llvm.org/rL210467
Motivation:
- We have customers who would like to see clang have more flexible behavior with respect to FP reciprocal approximations. This means that -freciprocal-math is honored as a separate optimization setting from -ffast-math (see existing gcc behavior for a starting point).
This is broken in the:
a. front-end: -freciprocal-math flag is ignored
b. the IR optimizer: UnsafeAlgebra implies AllowReciprocal
c. the backend: IR FMF flags are dropped entirely
- Longer-term and more fundamentally: one of the goals for IR-level FMF was to allow mixing of strict and relaxed FP math code. This is impossible without backend support. The problem is exacerbated by LTO.
My initial draft of this patch left the nsw/nuw/exact changes mostly as-is, but it quickly became clear that maintaining the APIs for those and adding FMF on the side made everything worse. So I grouped all of the optimization flags into one class and went from there. The flags and node classes are copied directly from the IR FMF class and FPMathOperator. We should obviously unify the backend with the IR optimizer on those flag bits, but I think that can be a follow-on patch? The goal of this initial patch is to not break any existing functionality or change the IR code while adding optional processing of FMF to the backend.
I'm promising to continue work on this to convert much more of the existing backend code to use FMF wherever possible.