Using LLVM bugpoint to hunt radeonsi compiler crashes

Shaders can be huge, and tracking down compiler crashes (or asserts) in LLVM with a giant shader isn't a lot of fun. Luckily, LLVM has a tool called Bugpoint. It takes a given piece of LLVM IR and tries a bunch of simplifications such as removing instructions or basic blocks, while checking that a given condition is still satisfied. Make the given condition something like "llc asserts with message X", and you have a very useful tool for reducing test cases. Unfortunately, its documentation isn't the greatest, so let me briefly dump how I have used it in the past.

I have a little script called run_llc.sh that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

if ! llc -mtriple=amdgcn-- -verify-machineinstrs "$@" 2>&1 | grep "error message here"; then
  exit 0
else
  exit $?
fi

When I encounter a compiler assertion, I first make sure to collect the offending shader from our driver using R600_DEBUG=ps,vs,gs,tcs,tes and extract it into a file like bug.ll. (In very rare cases, one may need the preoptir option in R600_DEBUG.) Then I edit run_llc.sh with the correct error message and run

bugpoint -compile-custom -compile-command ./run_llc.sh bug.ll

It'll churn for some time and produce a hopefully much smaller .bc file that one can use the usual tools on, such as llc, opt, and llvm-dis.

Occasionally, it can be useful to run the result through opt -instnamer or to simplify it further by hand, but usually, bugpoint provides a good starting point.