[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 2/3] glsl: add continue/break/return unification/elimination pass

[Luca Barbieri]

>> at least for chips with no control flow support like nv30 and i915
> s/at least/only
> This doesn't reduce divergence, only increases code size.

The purpose of this unrolling is not to reduce divergence, but to
avoid the expense of computing and checking the loop iteration
variable, and the expense of the loop construct itself, which may be
significant if the loop consists of only one instruction or so.

Thus, it should be an optimization an any hardware, provided that
appropriate heuristics are employed, so that only short loops with
little iterations are unrolled (this will probably need Gallium caps
to give hints to the compiler).

Right now it will usually trigger only when control flow is
unsupported, because breaks are only lowered in that case, and the
loop is not likely to be in the form this technique requires
otherwise.

However, we should add a "small loop with few iterations heuristic"
that will turn on all lowering for the loop in question so it can
always be unrolled.
Functions should similarly have their returns unified only if the
inliner is going to inline the function, which it shouldn't do
indiscriminately as it does right now if the hardware supports
function calls.

Anyway, a higher priority in this area is to prevent the inliner and
loop unroller from running indefinitely as the tests I posted on
piglit ML show.