I've started the final release testing for Exupery 0.14. There are two
bugs captured with tests so far. The first has something to do with
interrupts, it needs a few running profilers to cause the bug to
happen. I'm hoping this one is the source of the unrepeatable bugs
that were in the the previous release, if so solving it may allow
Exupery to run for much longer as a background compiler.
The second bug is caused by the current work. What's happening is the
currentContext register is being spilled but is being used by code
generated in the register allocator to load the stack. It may also be
needed by spill code to spill back into the stack.
The simplest fix is to avoid spilling the currentContext. I doubt that
spilling the currentContext is a good idea as it'll make spills of
stack registers much more complex. Not spilling currentContext is
probably the right thing to do unless the spill heuristics are
improved to avoid spilling currentContext then spilling many stack
registers that will use it to load themselves from the stack.
A theoretically better fix would be to get the register allocator to
reload the currentContext if required when generating spill code that
needs it. This is nicer as it doesn't require making another register
special. There are a few practical problems to make sure that this
doesn't lead to very bad code when we decide to spill currentContext
then spill other registers. Also, the only gain to handling
currentContext as a real register is allowing it to be spilled when
appropriate which could be very nice if it was a special register that
would be loaded from it's real location rather than spilled from the
stack.
My feeling is the right solution for now is to avoid spilling
currentContext and leave the better solution until a time when it's
appropriate to develop a more complete solution including both proper
spill heuristics and reloading spilled registers from the
interpreter's variables.
The background compiler compiled over 1200 methods before running into
one where the currentContext was spilled. So at worst, forcing it into
a register will only make 1 method in a thousand worse, and may make
it better.
Bryce
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