old register allocators by coloring

Sid Ahmed Ali TOUATI <Sid-Ahmed-Ali.TOUATI@inria.fr>
25 Nov 2001 22:39:52 -0500

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old register allocators by coloring Sid-Ahmed-Ali.TOUATI@inria.fr (Sid Ahmed Ali TOUATI) (2001-11-25)
Re: old register allocators by coloring thp@cs.ucr.edu (2001-12-15)
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From: Sid Ahmed Ali TOUATI <Sid-Ahmed-Ali.TOUATI@inria.fr>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 25 Nov 2001 22:39:52 -0500
Organization: INRIA
Keywords: registers
Posted-Date: 25 Nov 2001 22:39:52 EST

Dear all,


I have an understanding (possible naive) problem about old register
allocation process by graph coloring. I suppose straight-line code, no
parallelism between instructions.


First, we know that the problem of searching an execution order of a
basic block statements such that the interference graph is k-colorable
is NP-complete. Dually, fixing this order and minimizing the spill
code is also NP-complete.


My question is about the coloring methods (Chaitin, Chow, etc...) for
register allocation. They generally make at first a live range
analysis step to build an interference graph. After, they try to color
it with some heuristics. I don't understand why they use heuristics
here : if we assume some live range schemes, so we have live
intervals. We can buid an interval graph : looking for a maximal
clique is not NP-complete in such a graph (and hence the dual coloring
problem is also easy). Why do they use heuristics here ?


Thank you
SAAT


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