LLVM 13.0.0 Release Notes — LLVM 13 documentation

# LLVM 13.0.0 Release Notes

- Introduction

- Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release

  - Changes to the LLVM IR

  - Changes to building LLVM

  - Changes to TableGen

  - Changes to the AArch64 Backend

  - Changes to the ARM Backend

  - Changes to the MIPS Target

  - Changes to the Hexagon Target

  - Changes to the PowerPC Target

  - Changes to the X86 Target

  - Changes to the AMDGPU Target

  - Changes to the AVR Target

  - Changes to the WebAssembly Target

  - Changes to the OCaml bindings

  - Changes to the C API

  - Changes to the Go bindings

  - Changes to the FastISel infrastructure

  - Changes to the DAG infrastructure

  - Changes to the Debug Info

  - Changes to the LLVM tools

  - Changes to LLDB

  - Changes to Sanitizers

- External Open Source Projects Using LLVM 13

- Additional Information

## Introduction

This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, release 13.0.0. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements from the previous release, improvements in various subprojects of LLVM, and some of the current users of the code. All LLVM releases may be downloaded from the LLVM releases web site.

For more information about LLVM, including information about the latest release, please check out the main LLVM web site. If you have questions or comments, the LLVM Developer’s Mailing List is a good place to send them.

Note that if you are reading this file from a Git checkout or the main LLVM web page, this document applies to the next release, not the current one. To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the releases page.

## Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release

- Windows Control-flow Enforcement Technology: the `-ehcontguard` option now emits valid unwind entrypoints which are validated when the context is being set during exception handling.

- Flang is now included in the binary packages released by LLVM.

- The debuginfo-test project has been renamed cross-project-tests and is now intended for testing components from multiple projects, not just debug information. The new “cross-project-tests” name replaces “debuginfo-test” in LLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS, and a new check-cross-project-tests target has been added for running all tests in the project. The pre-existing check-debuginfo- test target remains for running just the debug information tests. (D95339 and D96513)

### Changes to the LLVM IR

- The `inalloca` attribute now has a mandatory type field, similar to `byval` and `sret`.

- The opaque pointer type `ptr` has been introduced. It is still in the process of being worked on and should not be used yet.

- Using the legacy pass manager for the optimization pipeline is deprecated and will be removed after LLVM 14. In the meantime, only minimal effort will be made to maintain the legacy pass manager for the optimization pipeline.

### Changes to building LLVM

- The build system now supports building multiple distributions, so that you can e.g. have one distribution containing just tools and another for libraries (to enable development). See Multi-distribution configurations for details.

### Changes to TableGen

### Changes to the AArch64 Backend

- Introduced assembly support for Armv9-A’s Realm Management Extension (RME) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME).

- Produce proper cross-section relative relocations on COFF

- Fixed the calling convention on Windows for variadic functions involving floats in the fixed arguments

### Changes to the ARM Backend

- Produce proper cross-section relative relocations on COFF

### Changes to the MIPS Target

During this release …

### Changes to the Hexagon Target

- The Hexagon target now supports V68/HVX ISA.

### Changes to the PowerPC Target

During this release …

### Changes to the X86 Target

During this release …

### Changes to the AMDGPU Target

During this release …

### Changes to the AVR Target

During this release …

### Changes to the WebAssembly Target

During this release …

### Changes to the OCaml bindings

### Changes to the C API

- The C API functions `LLVMGetAlignment` and `LLVMSetAlignment` now allow changing alignment on atomicrmw and cmpxchg instructions

- A new entry `LLVMDIArgListMetadataKind` was added to the `LLVMMetadataKind` enum, representing DIArgLists (D88175)

- Type attributes have been added to LLVM-C, introducing LLVMCreateTypeAttribute, LLVMGetTypeAttributeValue and LLVMIsTypeAttribute. (D977763’)

- The `LTO_API_VERSION` was bumped to 28, introducing a new function `lto_set_debug_options` for parsing LTO debug options (D92611)

- `LLVMJITTargetSymbolFlags` was renamed to `LLVMJITSymbolTargetFlags` (rG8d718a0bff73af066675a6258c01307937c33cf9)

- The C API received support for creating custom ORCv2 MaterializationUnits and APIs to retrieve an LLJIT instance’s linking layers. An ABI breaking change for `LLVMOrcAbsoluteSymbols` was introduced to make it consistent with `LLVMOrcCreateCustomMaterializationUnit`. (rGc8fc5e3ba942057d6c4cdcd1faeae69a28e7b671)

- The C API received support for adding ORCv2 object buffers directly to an object layer. (rG7b73cd684a8d5fb44d34064200f10e2723085c33)

- A breaking change to `LLVMGetInlineAsm` was introduced, adding a ninth argument `LLVMBool CanThrow` (D95745)

- The C API received support for calling into the new pass manager. (D102136)

- The C API function `LLVMIntrinsicCopyOverloadedName` has been deprecated. Please migrate to `LLVMIntrinsicCopyOverloadedName2` which takes an extra module argument and which also handles unnamed types. (D99173)

- The C API received support for dumping objects from ORCv2 (rGcec8e69f01c3374cb38c6683058381b96fab8f89)

- A breaking change to `LLVMOrcObjectTransformLayerTransformFunction` was introduced, changing the order of the function pointer’s arguments. (rG8962c68ad007a525f9daa987c99eda57e0d0069a)

- The C API received support for accessing utilities from the LLJIT `IRTransformLayer` and `ThreadSafeModule` classes. (D103855)

- The C API received support for creating lazy-export MaterializationUnits (D104672)

- The C API function `LLVMPassBuilderOptionsSetCoroutines` was removed because couroutine passes have been enabled by default. (D105877)

- `comdat noduplicates` was renamed to `comdat nodeduplicate` and as a result, `LLVMNoDuplicatesComdatSelectionKind` was renamed to `LLVMNoDeduplicateComdatSelectionKind`. (D106319)

### Changes to the Go bindings

### Changes to the FastISel infrastructure

- FastISel no longer tracks killed registers, and instead leaves this to the register allocator. This means that `hasTrivialKill()` is removed, as well as the `OpNIsKill` parameters to the `fastEmit_*()` family of functions.

### Changes to the DAG infrastructure

### Changes to the Debug Info

During this release …

### Changes to the LLVM tools

- The options `--build-id-link-{dir,input,output}` have been deleted. (D96310)

- Support for in-order processors has been added to `llvm-mca`. (D94928)

- llvm-objdump supports `-M {att,intel}` now. `--x86-asm-syntax` is a deprecated internal option which will be removed in LLVM 14.0.0. (D101695)

- The llvm-readobj short aliases `-s` (previously `--sections`) and `-t` (previously `--syms`) have been changed to `--syms` and `--section-details` respectively, to match llvm-readelf. (D105055)

- The llvm-nm short aliases `-M` (`--print-armap`), `-U` (`--defined-only`), and `-W` (`--no-weak`) are now deprecated. Use the long form versions instead. The alias `--just-symbol-name` is now deprecated in favor of `--format=just-symbols` and `-j`. (D105330)

- In lli the default JIT engine switched from MCJIT (`-jit-kind=mcjit`) to ORC (`-jit-kind=orc`). (D98931)

- llvm-rc got support for invoking Clang to preprocess its input. (D100755)

- llvm-rc got a GNU windres compatible frontend, llvm-windres. (D100756)

- llvm-ml has improved compatibility with MS ml.exe, managing to assemble more asm files.

### Changes to LLDB

- LLDB executable is now included in pre-built LLVM binaries.

- LLDB now includes full featured support for AArch64 SVE register access.

- LLDB now supports AArch64 Pointer Authentication, allowing stack unwind with signed return address.

- LLDB now supports debugging programs on AArch64 Linux that use memory tagging (MTE).

- Added `memory tag read` and `memory tag write` commands.

- The `memory region` command will note when a region has memory tagging enabled.

- Synchronous and asynchronous tag faults are recognised.

- Synchronous tag faults have memory tag annotations in addition to the usual fault address.

### Changes to Sanitizers

## External Open Source Projects Using LLVM 13

- A project…

## Additional Information

A wide variety of additional information is available on the LLVM web page, in particular in the documentation section. The web page also contains versions of the API documentation which is up-to-date with the Git version of the source code. You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by going into the `llvm/docs/` directory in the LLVM tree.

If you have any questions or comments about LLVM, please feel free to contact us via the mailing lists.