Fine-Grain Stacked Register Allocation for the Itanium Architecture

Abstract

The introduction of a hardware managed register stack in the Itanium Architecture creates an opportunity to optimize both the frequency in which a compiler requests allocation of registers from this stack and the number of registers requested. The Itanium Architecture specifies the implementation of a Register Stack Engine (RSE) that automatically performs register spills and fills. However, if the compiler requests too many registers, through the alloc instruction, the RSE will be forced to execute unnecessary spill and fill operations. In this paper we introduce the formulation of the fine-grain register stack frame sizing problem. The normal interaction between the compiler and the RSE suggested by the Itanium Architecture designers is for the compiler to request the maximum number of registers required by a procedure at the procedure invocation. Our new problem formulation allows for more conservative stack register allocation because it acknowledges that the number of registers required in different control flow paths varies significantly. We introduce a basic algorithm to solve the stack register allocation problem, and present our preliminary performance results from the implementation of our algorithm in the Open64 compiler.