Nowadays, compilers are looking for more optimizing opportunities by performing aggressive code transformations which introduce high register pressure. High register pressure potentially increases register overhead operations. Register allocation must deal with high register pressure well so that the performance gain of the code transformations is not thrown away by the increased overhead operations.

Register allocation must deal with three issues: spilling, live-range splitting, and register assignment. These issues are closely related to each other. Focusing on one issue and ignoring the others may deteriorate the quality of register allocation. This dissertation proposes a novel register-allocation approach that is fusion-based. Fusion-style register allocation starts off with constructing regions and applies graph fusion along control-flow edges to combine the interference graphs of regions into the interference graph for the whole function. Graph fusion integrates spilling, splitting, and register assignment in a seamless fashion. Fusion-based register allocation is sensitive to the ordering of control-flow edges that connect regions. Splitting is unlikely to happen at high priority edges (frequently executed) and likely to happen at low priority edges (infrequently executed).

This dissertation presents a register allocation framework that allows us to model various register allocation approaches, e.g., Chaitin-style, optimistic, priority-based, and fusion-style coloring. Fusion-style coloring also provides a nice framework to model various live-range splitting approaches such as the Tera, SSA, PDG, and Multiflow approaches.

This dissertation evaluates the effectiveness of fusion-style coloring under the register pressure caused by scope expanding transformations such as unrolling and inlining, whereas the traditional Chaitin-style coloring breaks down. The experimental results show that the number of register overhead operations using fusion-style coloring increases slowly. In other words, fusion-style coloring provides a solution to region-based compilation so that register allocation is no longer an obstacle to region-based compilation.

This dissertation presents and evaluats several enhancements to register allocation. These enhancements combine the strengths of both Chaitin-style and priority-based coloring into one. The integration of these enhancements provides a model of dealing with call cost (register saves/restores). The experimental results show that the model actually outperforms some existing approaches that have been adopted by researchers.

197 pages

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