The combine that forms extloads used to be disabled on vector types,
because "None of the supported targets knows how to perform load and
sign extend on vectors in one instruction."
That's not entirely true, since at least SSE4.1 X86 knows how to do
those sextloads/zextloads (with PMOVS/ZX).
But there are several aspects to getting this right.
First, vector extloads are controlled by a profitability callback.
For instance, on ARM, several instructions have folded extload forms,
so it's not always beneficial to create an extload node (and trying to
match extloads is a whole 'nother can of worms).
The interesting optimization enables folding of s/zextloads to illegal
(splittable) vector types, expanding them into smaller legal extloads.
It's not ideal (it introduces some legalization-like behavior in the
combine) but it's better than the obvious alternative: form illegal
extloads, and later try to split them up. If you do that, you might
generate extloads that can't be split up, but have a valid ext+load
expansion. At vector-op legalization time, it's too late to generate
this kind of code, so you end up forced to scalarize. It's better to
just avoid creating egregiously illegal nodes.
This optimization is enabled unconditionally on X86.
Note that the splitting combine is happy with "custom" extloads. As
is, this bypasses the actual custom lowering, and just unrolls the
extload. But from what I've seen, this is still much better than the
current custom lowering, which does some kind of unrolling at the end
anyway (see for instance load_sext_4i8_to_4i64 on SSE2, and the added
FIXME).
Also note that the existing combine that forms extloads is now also
enabled on legal vectors. This doesn't have a big effect on X86
(because sext+load is usually combined to sext_inreg+aextload).
On ARM it fires on some rare occasions; that's for a separate commit.
Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D6904
llvm-svn: 228325
e892d13d90