SIMD/SSE support & alignment

[Geoffrey Mainland]

On 03/12/2013 03:01 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Geoffrey Mainland <mainland at apeiron.net> wrote:
>
> Unboxed vectors are allocated by GHC, and it does not align memory on
> 16-byte boundaries, so our first cut at SSE intrinsics simply used
> unaligned accesses. Obviously with ForeignPtr's we can control alignment
> and potentially use the aligned variants of SSE instructions, but this
> will almost double the number of primops. One could imagine extending
> our fusion framework to transition to aligned move instructions.
>
>
> When I implemented the memcpy primops I added an optional alignment
> parameter (rather than a new primop) to each primop. LLVM uses the
> same setup. Perhaps it could work for you?
>
> -- Johan

LLVM needs to know statically whether or not an SSE move is aligned---it
can't be computed at runtime. I don't think passing an extra Int#
argument (or whatever) to a primop is going to work.

Geoff