=========================
LLVM 12.0.0 Release Notes
=========================

.. contents::
    :local:

.. warning::
   These are in-progress notes for the upcoming LLVM 12 release.
   Release notes for previous releases can be found on
   `the Download Page <https://releases.llvm.org/download.html>`_.


Introduction
============

This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure,
release 12.0.0.  Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements
from the previous release, improvements in various subprojects of LLVM, and
some of the current users of the code.  All LLVM releases may be downloaded
from the `LLVM releases web site <https://llvm.org/releases/>`_.

For more information about LLVM, including information about the latest
release, please check out the `main LLVM web site <https://llvm.org/>`_.  If you
have questions or comments, the `LLVM Developer's Mailing List
<https://lists.llvm.org/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev>`_ is a good place to send
them.

Note that if you are reading this file from a Git checkout or the main
LLVM web page, this document applies to the *next* release, not the current
one.  To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the `releases
page <https://llvm.org/releases/>`_.

Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release
=================================================
.. NOTE
   For small 1-3 sentence descriptions, just add an entry at the end of
   this list. If your description won't fit comfortably in one bullet
   point (e.g. maybe you would like to give an example of the
   functionality, or simply have a lot to talk about), see the `NOTE` below
   for adding a new subsection.

* The ConstantPropagation pass was removed. Users should use the InstSimplify
  pass instead.


.. NOTE
   If you would like to document a larger change, then you can add a
   subsection about it right here. You can copy the following boilerplate
   and un-indent it (the indentation causes it to be inside this comment).

   Special New Feature
   -------------------

   Makes programs 10x faster by doing Special New Thing.


Changes to the LLVM IR
----------------------

* ...

* Added the ``byref`` attribute to better represent argument passing
  for the `amdgpu_kernel` calling convention.

* Added type parameter to the ``sret`` attribute to continue work on
  removing pointer element types.

* The ``llvm.experimental.vector.reduce`` family of intrinsics have been renamed
  to drop the "experimental" from the name, reflecting their now fully supported
  status in the IR.


Changes to building LLVM
------------------------

* The internal ``llvm-build`` Python script and the associated ``LLVMBuild.txt``
  files used to describe the LLVM component structure have been removed and
  replaced by a pure ``CMake`` approach, where each component stores extra
  properties in the created targets. These properties are processed once all
  components are defined to resolve library dependencies and produce the header
  expected by llvm-config.

Changes to TableGen
-------------------

* The new "TableGen Programmer's Reference" replaces the "TableGen Language
  Introduction" and "TableGen Language Reference" documents.

* The syntax for specifying an integer range in a range list has changed.
  The old syntax used a hyphen in the range (e.g., ``{0-9}``). The new syntax
  uses the "`...`" range punctuation (e.g., ``{0...9}``). The hyphen syntax
  is deprecated.

Changes to the AArch64 Backend
--------------------------

During this release ...

* Lots of improvements to generation of Windows unwind data; the unwind
  data is optimized and written in packed form where possible, reducing
  the size of unwind data (pdata and xdata sections) by around 60%
  compared with LLVM 11. The generation of prologs/epilogs is tweaked
  when targeting Windows, to increase the chances of being able to use
  the packed unwind info format.

* Support for creating Windows unwind data using ``.seh_*`` assembler
  directives.

* Produce proper assembly output for the Windows target, including
  ``:lo12:`` relocation specifiers, to allow the assembly output
  to actually be assembled.

* Changed the assembly comment string for MSVC targets to ``//`` (consistent
  with the MinGW and ELF targets), freeing up ``;`` to be used as
  statement separator.

Changes to the ARM Backend
--------------------------

During this release ...

Changes to the MIPS Target
--------------------------

During this release ...


Changes to the PowerPC Target
-----------------------------

Optimization:

* Made improvements to loop unroll-and-jam including fix to respect user
  provided #pragma unroll-and-jam for loops on targets other than ARM.
* Improved PartialInliner allowing it to handle code regions in a switch
  statements.
* Improved PGO support on AIX by building and linking with compiler-rt profile
  library.
* Add support for Epilogue Vectorization and enabled it by default.

CodeGen:

* POWER10 support
  * Implementation of PC Relative addressing in LLD including the associated
    linker optimizations.
  * Add support for the new matrix multiplication (MMA) instructions to Clang
    and LLVM.
  * Implementation of Power10 builtins.

* Scheduling enhancements
  * Add a new algorithm to cluster more loads/stores if the DAG is not too
    complicated.
  * Enable the PowerPC scheduling heuristic for Power10.

* Target dependent passes tuning
  * Enhance LoopStrengthReduce/PPCLoopInstrFormPrep pass for PowerPC,
    especially for P10 intrinsics.
  * Enhance machine combiner pass to reduce register pressure for PowerPC.
  * Improve MachineSink to do more sinking based on register pressure and alias
    analysis.

* General improvements
  * Complete the constrained floating point operations support.
  * Improve the llvm-exegesis support.
  * Improve the stack clash protection to probe the gap between stackptr and
    realigned stackptr.
  * Improve the IEEE long double support for Power8.
  * Enable MemorySSA for LoopSink.
  * Enhance LLVM debugging functionality via options such as -print-changed and
    -print-before-changed.
  * Add builtins for Power9 (i.e. darn, xvtdiv, xvtsqrt etc).
  * Add options to disable all or part of LoopIdiomRecognizePass.
  * Add support for printing the DDG in DOT form allowing for visual inspection
    of the Data Dependence Graph.
  * Remove the QPX support.
  * Significant number of bug fixes including all the fixes necessary to
    achieve a clean test run for Julia.

AIX Support:

* Compiler-rt support
  * Add support for building compiler-rt for AIX and 32-bit Power targets.
  * Made compiler-rt the default rtlib for AIX.

* General Improvements
  * Enable the AIX extended AltiVec ABI under option -mabi=vec-extabi.
  * Add partial C99 complex type support.
  * Implemente traceback table for functions (encodes vector information,
    emits exception handling).
  * Implemente code generation for C++ dynamic initialization and finalization.
    of non-local variables for use with the -bcdtors option of the AIX linker.
  * Add new option -mignore-xcoff-visibility.
  * Enable explicit sections on AIX.
  * Enable -f[no-]data-sections on AIX and set -fdata-sections to be the default
    on AIX.
  * Enable -f[no-]function-sections.
  * Add support for relocation generation using the large code model.
  * Add pragma align natural and sorted out pragma pack stack effect.


Changes to the X86 Target
-------------------------

During this release ...

* The 'mpx' feature was removed from the backend. It had been removed from clang
  frontend in 10.0. Mention of the 'mpx' feature in an IR file will print a
  message to stderr, but IR should still compile.
* Support for ``-march=alderlake``, ``-march=sapphirerapids``,
  ``-march=znver3`` and ``-march=x86-64-v[234]`` has been added.
* The assembler now has support for {disp32} and {disp8} pseudo prefixes for
  controlling displacement size for memory operands and jump displacements. The
  assembler also supports the .d32 and .d8 mnemonic suffixes to do the same.
* A new function attribute "tune-cpu" has been added to support -mtune like gcc.
  This allows microarchitectural optimizations to be applied independent from
  the "target-cpu" attribute or TargetMachine CPU which will be used to select
  Instruction Set. If the attribute is not present, the tune CPU will follow
  the target CPU.
* Support for ``HRESET`` instructions has been added.
* Support for ``UINTR`` instructions has been added.
* Support for ``AVXVNNI`` instructions has been added.

Changes to the AMDGPU Target
-----------------------------

During this release ...

* The new ``byref`` attribute is now the preferred method for
  representing aggregate kernel arguments.

Changes to the AVR Target
-----------------------------

During this release ...

Changes to the WebAssembly Target
---------------------------------

During this release ...

Changes to the OCaml bindings
-----------------------------


Changes to the C API
--------------------


Changes to the Go bindings
--------------------------


Changes to the DAG infrastructure
---------------------------------


Changes to the Debug Info
---------------------------------

During this release ...

* The DIModule metadata is extended with a field to indicate if it is a
  module declaration. This extension enables the emission of debug info
  for a Fortran 'use <external module>' statement. For more information
  on what the debug info entries should look like and how the debugger
  can use them, please see test/DebugInfo/X86/dimodule-external-fortran.ll.

Changes to the LLVM tools
---------------------------------

* llvm-readobj and llvm-readelf behavior has changed to report an error when
  executed with no input files instead of reading an input from stdin.
  Reading from stdin can still be achieved by specifying `-` as an input file.

* llvm-mca supports serialization of the timeline and summary views.
  The `--json` command line option prints a JSON representation of
  these views to stdout.

Changes to LLDB
---------------------------------

Changes to Sanitizers
---------------------

The integer sanitizer `-fsanitize=integer` now has a new sanitizer:
`-fsanitize=unsigned-shift-base`. It's not undefined behavior for an unsigned
left shift to overflow (i.e. to shift bits out), but it has been the source of
bugs and exploits in certain codebases in the past.

Many Sanitizers (asan, cfi, lsan, msan, tsan, ubsan) have support for
musl-based Linux distributions. Some of them may be rudimentary.

External Open Source Projects Using LLVM 12
===========================================

* A project...

Additional Information
======================

A wide variety of additional information is available on the `LLVM web page
<https://llvm.org/>`_, in particular in the `documentation
<https://llvm.org/docs/>`_ section.  The web page also contains versions of the
API documentation which is up-to-date with the Git version of the source
code.  You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by
going into the ``llvm/docs/`` directory in the LLVM tree.

If you have any questions or comments about LLVM, please feel free to contact
us via the `mailing lists <https://llvm.org/docs/#mailing-lists>`_.