References

This wiki describes useful information on opt including examples of running it, what passes ran during the example, and what they did. It will be usefull for understanding opt passes.

LLVM’s documentation page is LLVM’s documentation on its list of passes. Of specific interest is the section entitled “Transform Passes” which gives a (technical and confusing) explanation of each of the passes which result in llvm transformation (as opposed to passes which perform analysis, which actually still might be useful for other things such as the heuristics for state analysis.

This blog provides a very detailed analysis of some of the llvm optimization passes.