Both run-time pointer checking and the dependence analysis are capable
of dealing with uniform addresses. I.e. it's really just an orthogonal
property of the loop that the analysis computes.
Run-time pointer checking will only try to reason about SCEVAddRec
pointers or else gives up. If the uniform pointer turns out the be a
SCEVAddRec in an outer loop, the run-time checks generated will be
correct (start and end bounds would be equal).
In case of the dependence analysis, we work again with SCEVs. When
compared against a loop-dependent address of the same underlying object,
the difference of the two SCEVs won't be constant. This will result in
returning an Unknown dependence for the pair.
When compared against another uniform access, the difference would be
constant and we should return the right type of dependence
(forward/backward/etc).
The changes also adds support to query this property of the loop and
modify the vectorizer to use this.
Patch by Ashutosh Nema!
llvm-svn: 234361
2d24bce667