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  1. May 22, 2009
    • Duncan Sands's avatar
      Add a new codegen pass that normalizes dwarf exception handling · d6fb6501
      Duncan Sands authored
      code in preparation for code generation.  The main thing it does
      is handle the case when eh.exception calls (and, in a future
      patch, eh.selector calls) are far away from landing pads.  Right
      now in practice you only find eh.exception calls close to landing
      pads: either in a landing pad (the common case) or in a landing
      pad successor, due to loop passes shifting them about.  However
      future exception handling improvements will result in calls far
      from landing pads:
      (1) Inlining of rewinds.  Consider the following case:
      In function @f:
      ...
        invoke @g to label %normal unwind label %unwinds
      ...
      unwinds:
        %ex = call i8* @llvm.eh.exception()
      ...
      
      In function @g:
      ...
        invoke @something to label %continue unwind label %handler
      ...
      handler:
        %ex = call i8* @llvm.eh.exception()
      ... perform cleanups ...
        "rethrow exception"
      
      Now inline @g into @f.  Currently this is turned into:
      In function @f:
      ...
        invoke @something to label %continue unwind label %handler
      ...
      handler:
        %ex = call i8* @llvm.eh.exception()
      ... perform cleanups ...
        invoke "rethrow exception" to label %normal unwind label %unwinds
      unwinds:
        %ex = call i8* @llvm.eh.exception()
      ...
      
      However we would like to simplify invoke of "rethrow exception" into
      a branch to the %unwinds label.  Then %unwinds is no longer a landing
      pad, and the eh.exception call there is then far away from any landing
      pads.
      
      (2) Using the unwind instruction for cleanups.
      It would be nice to have codegen handle the following case:
        invoke @something to label %continue unwind label %run_cleanups
      ...
      handler:
      ... perform cleanups ...
        unwind
      
      This requires turning "unwind" into a library call, which
      necessarily takes a pointer to the exception as an argument
      (this patch also does this unwind lowering).  But that means
      you are using eh.exception again far from a landing pad.
      
      (3) Bugpoint simplifications.  When bugpoint is simplifying
      exception handling code it often generates eh.exception calls
      far from a landing pad, which then causes codegen to assert.
      Bugpoint then latches on to this assertion and loses sight
      of the original problem.
      
      Note that it is currently rare for this pass to actually do
      anything.  And in fact it normally shouldn't do anything at
      all given the code coming out of llvm-gcc!  But it does fire
      a few times in the testsuite.  As far as I can see this is
      almost always due to the LoopStrengthReduce codegen pass
      introducing pointless loop preheader blocks which are landing
      pads and only contain a branch to another block.  This other
      block contains an eh.exception call.  So probably by tweaking
      LoopStrengthReduce a bit this can be avoided.
      
      llvm-svn: 72276
      d6fb6501
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