Analysis Of LLVM Compiler Infrastructure And Backend Porting For Arm

With the rising challenges, such as the complexity of logic design, many platform-based designs came out. While providing a good solution for hardware design, platform-based designs still need to supply a qualified development toolchain, including compiler, assembler, simulator and etc. Then ADL (Architecture Description Language) came out to facilitate the generation of the toolchain. MADL (Mescal Architecture Description Language) is a well-designed but immature one. Our UADL (Unified Architecture Description Language) project aims to offer a better toolchain auto-generation methodology on the basis of MADL. This paper is part of the UADL project and gives a solution to LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) backend porting, which can be the basis of the research of compiler auto-generation for UADL project. LLVM Infrastructure is an open-source compiler structure developed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this paper, first the components of LLVM Infrastructure and their corresponding functions are introduced. Then LLVM Infrastructure's backend-porting scheme is analyzed, including register description, instruction description, assembly output etc. Finally, the details of porting LLVM Infrastructure on ARM are given and the LLVM Infrastructure's support for ARM backend is arrived.