This is one of those wonderful "in theory X doesn't matter, but in practice is does" changes. In this particular case, we shift the IVs inserted by the runtime unroller to clamp iteration count of the loops* from decrementing to incrementing.
Why does this matter? A couple of reasons:
* SCEV doesn't have a native subtract node. Instead, all subtracts (A - B) are represented as A + -1 * B and drops any flags invalidated by such. As a result, SCEV is slightly less good at reasoning about edge cases involving decrementing addrecs than incrementing ones. (You can see this in the inferred flags in some of the test cases.)
* Other parts of the optimizer produce incrementing IVs, and they're common in idiomatic source language. We do have support for reversing IVs, but in general if we produce one of each, the pair will persist surprisingly far through the optimizer before being coalesced. (You can see this looking at nearby phis in the test cases.)
Note that if the hardware prefers decrementing (i.e. zero tested) loops, LSR should convert back immediately before codegen.
* Mostly irrelevant detail: The main loop of the prolog case is handled independently and will simple use the original IV with a changed start value. We could in theory use this scheme for all iteration clamping, but that's a larger and more invasive change.
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.
Philip Reames