RFC: Reducing the number of non volatile GPRs in the ppc64 kernel

[Segher Boessenkool]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 03:08:29PM -0500, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> [snip code]
> 
> After the prologue there are 46 insns executed before the epilogue.
> Many of those are conditional branches (that are not executed); it is
> all fall-through until it jumps to the "tail" (the few insns before
> the epilogue).  GCC knows how to duplicate a tail so that it can do
> shrink-wrapping (the original tail needs to be followed by an epilogue,
> the duplicated one does not want one); but it can only do it in very
> simple cases (one basic block or at least no control flow), and that
> is not the case here.  We need to handle more generic tails.

And never mind the elephant in the room: the "fastpath" instructions
already use a few non-volatile registers, and the shrink-wrap pass
(which runs after register allocation) cannot fix that.  Ugh.

> This seems related to (if not the same as!) <http://gcc.gnu.org/PR51982>.

This has that same problem, too.


Segher