The unrolling code was previously inserting new cloned blocks at the end of the function. The result of this with typical loop structures is that the new iterations are placed far from the initial iteration.
With unrolling, the general assumption is that the a) the loop is reasonable hot, and b) the first Count-1 copies of the loop are rarely (if ever) loop exiting. As such, placing Count-1 copies out of line is a fairly poor code placement choice. We'd much rather fall through into the hot (non-exiting) path. For code with branch profiles, later layout would fix this, but this may have a positive impact on non-PGO compiled code.
However, the real motivation for this change isn't performance. Its readability and human understanding. Having to jump around long distances in an IR file to trace an unrolled loop structure is error prone and tedious.
This is a more general alternative/extension to D102635. Rather than
handling the special case of "header exit with non-exiting latch",
this unrolls against the smallest exact trip count from any exit.
The latch exit is no longer treated as priviledged when it comes to
full unrolling.
The motivating case is in full-unroll-one-unpredictable-exit.ll.
Here the header exit is an IV-based exit, while the latch exit is
a data comparison. This kind of loop does not get rotated, because
the latch is already exiting, and loop rotation doesn't try to
distinguish IV-based/analyzable latches.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D102982
This test case would get miscompiled by the current version of
D102982, because unrolling does not respect the PreserveCondBr
flag for partial unrolling.
Philip Reames