On Dec 30, 2008, at 6:39 AM, Corbin Simpson wrote: >> However, the special instrucions cannot directly be mapped to LLVM >> IR, like >> "min", the conversion involves in 'extract' the vector, create >> less-than-compare, create 'select' instruction, and create 'insert- >> element' >> instruction.
Using scalar operations obviously works, but will probably produce very inefficient code. One positive thing is that all target-specific operations of supported vector ISAs (Altivec and SSE[1-4] currently) are exposed either through LLVM IR ops or through target-specific builtins/intrinsics. This means that you can get access to all the crazy SSE instructions, but it means that your codegen would have to handle this target-specific code generation. The direction we're going is to expose more and more vector operations in LLVM IR. For example, compares and select are currently being worked on, so you can do a comparison of two vectors which returns a vector of bools, and use that as the compare value of a select instruction (selecting between two vectors). This would allow implementing min and a variety of other operations and is easier for the codegen to reassemble into a first-class min operation etc. I don't know what the status of this is, I think it is partially implemented but may not be complete yet. >> I don't have experience of the new vector instructions in LLVM, and >> perhaps >> that's why it makes me feel it's complicated to fold the swizzle and >> writemask. We have really good support for swizzling operations already with the shuffle_vector instruction. I'm not sure about writemask. > > Um, I was thinking that we should eventually create intrinsic > functions > for some of the commands, like LIT, that might not be > single-instruction, but that can be lowered eventually, and for > commands > like LG2, that might be single-instruction for shaders, but probably > not > for non-shader chipsets. Sure, it would be very reasonable to make these target-specific builtins when targeting a GPU, the same way we have target-specific builtins for SSE. -Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mesa3d-dev mailing list Mesa3d-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa3d-dev
