| LLVM Visualization Tool |
| CS497rej Spring 2004 term project |
| Team members: Misha Brukman, Tanya Brethour, Brian Gaeke |
| |
| The Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a new compiler infrastructure that |
| uses a typed, three-address low-level intermediate code representation for |
| programs written in higher-level languages, making optimizations possible |
| across the entire lifetime of a program: at compile time, link time, |
| install time, runtime, and idle time. |
| |
| Our main goal in this project is to build a tool that can be used |
| to visualize the effects of transformations written in the LLVM |
| framework. Compilation units in LLVM have a simple, hierarchical structure: |
| a Module contains Functions, which contain BasicBlocks, which contain |
| Instructions. At the lowest level of this hierarchy, Instructions may |
| reference other BasicBlocks (with branches) or Functions (with calls), |
| making the control-flow graphs and call graphs explicit. Our first task |
| is to develop an interactive browser for these graphs and hierarchies. |
| |
| Our target audience is compiler developers working within the LLVM framework, |
| who are trying to understand and debug transformations. |
| |
| For this semester, our visualization tool will not reflect dynamic updates |
| to the code; rather, it will reflect the state of a compilation unit at |
| a single instant in time, between transformations. Future work should |
| extend this tool to reflect a dynamically updating view of the program as |
| a transformation is modifying the code. |
| |
| We intend to implement this tool in C++, because it will dramatically |
| simplify the task of integrating it with the LLVM compiler framework |
| (which itself is 150,000 lines of C++). We intend to use wxWidgets as our |
| GUI toolkit. |
| |
| How to compile: |
| |
| % ./configure --with-llvmsrc=[path] --with-llvmobj=[path] |
| If you're building in llvm/projects/llvm-tv, then you don't need |
| to specify these --with options. |
| % cd lib/wxwindows |
| % ./configure --enable-debug --prefix=`pwd` |
| Make absolutely sure that wxwindows's configure picks up the same |
| C++ compiler that you're using for llvm. Otherwise, you may get |
| weird link errors when trying to link the llvm-tv tool. |
| % cd ../../ |
| % gmake |
| |
| Example of usage: |
| |
| % llvm-tv.exe & |
| The .exe is not a typo; this command starts up the visualizer in |
| the background using its wrapper script. |
| % opt-snap -debug -licm -snapshot -gcse -snapshot < bytecode-file.bc > /dev/null |
| This runs the llvm optimizer driver with the snapshot pass loaded, using |
| another wrapper script, and makes two snapshots, which should appear |
| in your visualizer. |
| |
