[PATCH] Use AA in LoopVectorize

hfinkel at anl.gov hfinkel at anl.gov
Sat Jul 19 19:59:08 PDT 2014


Hi nadav, aschwaighofer,

Currently, the loop vectorizer does not use the alias analysis infrastructure. Instead, it performs memory dependence analysis using ScalarEvolution-based linear dependence checks within equivalence classes derived from the results of ValueTracking's GetUnderlyingObjects.

Unfortunately, this means that:
  1. The loop vectorizer has logic that essentially duplicates that in BasicAA for aliasing based on identified objects
  2. The loop vectorizer cannot partition the space of dependency checks based on information only easily available from within AA (TBAA metadata is currently the prime example).

This means, for example, regardless of whether -fno-strict-aliasing is provided, the vectorizer will only vectorize this loop with a runtime memory-overlap check:

void foo(int *a, float *b) {
  for (int i = 0; i < 1600; ++i) {
    a[i] = b[i];
  }
}

This is suboptimal because the TBAA metadata already provides the information necessary to show that this check unnecessary. Of course, the vectorizer has a limit on the number of such checks it will insert, so in practice, ignoring TBAA means not vectorizing more-complicated loops that we should.

This patch causes the vectorizer to use an AliasSetTracker to keep track of the pointers in the loop. The resulting alias sets are then used to partition the space of dependency checks, and potential runtime checks; this results in more-efficient vectorizations.

When pointer locations are added to the AliasSetTracker, two things are done:
  1. The location size is set to UnknownSize (otherwise you'd not catch inter-iteration dependencies)
  2. For instructions in blocks that would need to be predicated, TBAA is removed (because the metadata might have a control dependency on the condition being speculated).

For non-predicated blocks, you can leave the TBAA metadata. This is safe because you can't have an iteration dependency on the TBAA metadata (if you did, and you unrolled sufficiently, you'd end up with the same pointer value used by two accesses that TBAA says should not alias, and that would yield undefined behavior).

http://reviews.llvm.org/D4599

Files:
  lib/Transforms/Vectorize/LoopVectorize.cpp
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/X86/small-size.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/X86/vector_ptr_load_store.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/calloc.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/gcc-examples.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/multiple-address-spaces.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/ptr_loops.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/runtime-check-address-space.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/store-shuffle-bug.ll
  test/Transforms/LoopVectorize/tbaa-nodep.ll
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