Chaitin and his colleagues at IBM in Yorktown Heights built the first global register allocator based on graph coloring. This thesis describes a series of improvements and extensions to the Yorktown allocator. There are four primary results: Optimistic coloring Chaitin's coloring heuristic pessimistically assumes any node of high degree will not be colored and must therefore be spilled. By optimistically assuming that nodes of high degree will receive colors, I often achieve lower spill costs and faster code; my results are never worse. Coloring pairs The pessimism of Chaitin's coloring heuristic is emphasized when trying to color register pairs. My heuristic handles pairs as a natural consequence of its optimism. Rematerialization Chaitin et al. introduced the idea of rematerialization to avoid the expense of spilling and reloading certain simple values. By propagating rematerialization information around the SSA graph using a simple variation of Wegman and Zadeck's constant propag...

This paper examines a problem that arises during global register allocation -- rematerialization. If a value cannot be kept in a register, the allocator should recognize when it is cheaper to recompute the value (rematerialize it) than to store and reload it. Chaitin's original graph-coloring allocator handled simple instances of this problem correctly. This paper details a general solution to the problem and presents experimental evidence that shows its importance. Our approach is to tag individual values in the procedure 's SSA graph with information specifying how it should be spilled. We use a variant of Wegman and Zadeck's sparse simple constant algorithm to propagate tags throughout the graph. The allocator then splits live ranges into values with different tags. This isolates those values that can be easily rematerialized from values that require general spilling. We modify the base allocator to use this information when estimating spill costs and introducing spill code. Our p...