(resent -- the mail monster apparently ate the first one)

Just to make this crazy thread even crazier, I have successfully gotten 
sparse to create a valid x86-64 object file from C source code (...which 
I then executed).

The attached patch adds a code generator backend to sparse, that 
generates LLVM bitcode.  This bitcode can then be converted to ELF .o 
files using standard tools -- see instructions in the header of s2l.c.

Do I expect this to be used in the kernel?  Not really.  I'm just doing 
this for fun, to add a compiler backend to sparse.  It was pretty easy 
to get integer and logical operations going.

The work is based on compile-i386; as it turns out, LLVM's bitcode can 
be made type-aware, so I wanted to see how things would turn out 
generating code at a higher level.  Given the higher-level constructs, I 
didn't feel the need to bother with linearized form.

Caveats...

- don't stray too far from simple, integer types
- bitfields caused explosions, but you knew that anyway

Cheers all,

     Jeff