Hi, I neglected to write about RA changes for the previous releases
and people asked me to write about RA changes for GCC-5. So here is what
I'd like to add to gcc-5/changes.html. I'll do it tomorrow. So any
comments will be appreciated.
Thanks.
Index: changes.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gcc/wwwdocs/htdocs/gcc-5/changes.html,v
retrieving revision 1.91
diff -U 5 -r1.91 changes.html
--- changes.html 23 Mar 2015 10:12:23 -0000 1.91
+++ changes.html 26 Mar 2015 19:24:32 -0000
@@ -95,10 +95,40 @@
<li>The new <code>gcov-tool</code> utility allows manipulating
profiles.</li>
<li>Profiles are now more tolerant to source file changes (this can be
controlled by <code>--param profile-func-internal-id</code>).</li>
</ul></li>
+ <li>Register allocation improvements:
+ <ul>
+ <li>A new local register allocator (LRA) sub-pass was added.
+ The sub-pass implements control-flow sensitive global
+ register rematerialization (controlled via
+ <code>-flra-remat</code>). Instead of spilling and
+ restoring register value, it is recalculated if it is
+ profitable. The sub-pass improved SPEC2000 generated code
+ by 1% and 0.5% correspondingly on ARM and x86-64.</li>
+ <li>In GCC-4.9 and earlier releases PIC hard register was fixed
+ and was not used for other purposes when PIC code was
+ generated. Reuse of PIC hard register was implemented in RA
+ for GCC-5.0. It improves generated PIC code performance as
+ more hard registers can be used. As an example, shared
+ libraries and OS Android would significantly benefit from
+ such optimization. Currently it is switched on only for
+ x86/x86-64 targets. As RA infrastructure is already
+ implemented for PIC register reuse, other targets might
+ follow this in the future.</li>
+ <li>A simple form of inter-procedural RA was implemented. When
+ it is known that a called function does not use caller saved
+ registers, save/restore code is not generated around the
+ call for such registers. This optimization can be controlled
+ by <code>-fipa-ra</code></li>
+ <li>On some architectures (e.g. modern Intel processors),
+ spilling general registers into vector registers can be more
+ profitable than spilling into memory. LRA had already such
+ optimization. It was significantly improved for GCC-5.0,
+ permitting more 85% such spills than in GCC-4.9.</li>
+ </ul></li>
<li>UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer gained a few new sanitization options:
<ul>
<li><code>-fsanitize=float-divide-by-zero</code>: detect floating-point
division by zero;</li>
<li><code>-fsanitize=float-cast-overflow</code>: check that the result
