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Limit operand to a set of physical registers

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
compilers

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Operand constraint forms (reg_def, reg_use, reg_fixed_def, and reg_fixed_use) and how MachineEnv represents physical registers. Compare the x86 32-bit byte-register limitation described for setcc with the existing supported ISAs. Done means a bounded set of physical registers can be expressed and its allocation behavior is covered by tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

It seems like there are currently two options when expressing which registers an Operand can use:

  • use reg_def/reg_use/..., in this case the operand can be allocated to any physical register.
  • use reg_fixed_def/reg_fixed_use, in this case the operand can only be a single physical register.

This does not seem to cover the case where only of a limited set of physical registers can be used as an operand.

This is often the case on x86 (32-bit), where some of the general purpose registers don't expose their lower 8 bits as a pseudoregister. This means that setcc and other instructions dealing with a byte can only use the first 4 registers, not eg. esi.

My current workaround is to always use fixed operands for these instructions, but that is a bit too limiting. The other solution is to completely remove the additional registers from the MachineEnv, but that has even bigger drawbacks. Is there a better solution? It seems none of the ISAs supported by wasmtime have this issue, so I can't steal any ideas there.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
266
Forks
54
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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