Per the documentation in Support/InstructionCost.h, the purpose of an invalid cost is so that clients can change behavior on impossible to cost inputs. CodeMetrics was instead asserting that invalid costs never occurred.
On a target with an incomplete cost model - e.g. RISCV - this means that transformations would crash on (falsely) invalid constructs - e.g. scalable vectors. While we certainly should improve the cost model - and I plan to do so in the near future - we also shouldn't be crashing. This violates the explicitly stated purpose of an invalid InstructionCost.
I updated all of the "easy" consumers where bailouts were locally obvious. I plan to follow up with loop unroll in a following change.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D127131
Philip Reames