And no other uses of a4. We could have used x0 trivially.
First we adjust the expander so that it doesn't force the constant into a
register. In the matching pattern we change the appropriate source constraints
from "r" to "rJ" and the output template is changed to use %z for the operand.
The net is we drop the li completely and emit vmv.s.x,v3,x0.
But wait, there's more. If we're broadcasting a constant in the range
[-16..15] into a vector, we currently load the constant into a register and use
vmv.v.r. We can instead use vmv.v.i, which avoids loading the constant into a
GPR. For that case we again avoid forcing the constant into a register in the
expander and adjust the output template to emit vmv.v.x or vmv.v.i based on
whether or not the appropriate operand is a constant or general purpose
register. So again, we'll drop a load immediate into a scalar for this case.
Whether or not we should use vmv.v.i vs vmv.s.x for loading [-16..15] into the
0th element is probably uarch dependent. The tradeoff is loading the GPR vs
the broadcast in the vector unit. I didn't bother with this case.
Tested in my tester (which tests rv64gcv as a default codegen option). Will
wait for the pre-commit tester to render a verdict.
gcc/
* config/riscv/constraints.md (P): New constraint.
* config/riscv/vector.md (pred_broadcast<mode> expander): Do
not force small integers into GPRs so aggressively.
(pred_broadcast<mode> insn & splitter): Allow splatting small
constants across the vector register directly. Allow splatting
(const_int 0) into element 0 directly.