I've been busy, and haven't really had time for TI stuff lately. I did have bits of time here and there to fiddle with GCC, and in that time I got the 159r.combine step working. So now I'm looking into 172r.ira.

The subreg instructions are removed somewhere in reload(), but since that's represents a huge amount of work, I've got some spelunking ahead of me.

I had a lot more trouble finding reload() than I thought. It's called everywhere, but is located in reload1.c. I'm noting that fact here to possibly save some time later.

The next step is final.c::cleanup_subreg_operands(), called from reload(). That seems to delete the subreg expressions.

simplify_rtx.c::simplify_subreg() is the ultimate cause, which is called by final.c::alter_subreg(), which also makes some changes. But it looks like those changes don't matter for me.

I modified simplify_subreg() to explicitly emit a subreg expression if a word-to-byte conversion is used. That RTL expression seems to be preserved until 201r.shorten. At that point, there's a segmentation fault in GCC. Getting closer...