[LLVMdev] MC-JIT Design

[James Molloy]

Hi,

I've been watching the MC-JIT progress for some time, and #2 certainly looks like the best idea to me. I think however you've missed an important selling point of the "FOOJIT" architecture:

* The use of a custom object file format directly enables the use of ahead-of-time compilation (using the JIT to recompile dynamically). Not only this but it allows the resaving of any functions that may have been JIT-optimised during runtime so they can be used immediately next run.

This, coincidentally, is something that I was pondering on a way to try to crowbar into the current JIT (was thinking along the lines of parsing relocatable ELF into memory and running a link step manually, then "informing" the JIT about the memory object...)

Sounds excellent.

James Molloy
Graduate Compiler Engineer, ARM Ltd.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu]
> On Behalf Of Daniel Dunbar
> Sent: 15 November 2010 18:15
> To: LLVM Developers Mailing List
> Subject: [LLVMdev] MC-JIT Design
>
> Hi all,
>
> As promised, here is the rough design of the upcoming MC-JIT*.
> Feedback appreciated!
>
> (*) To be clear, we are only calling it the MC-JIT until we have
> finished killing the old one. When I say JIT below, I mean the MC-JIT.
> I basically am ignoring completely the existing JIT. I will keep
> things API compatible whenever possible, of course.
>
> I see two main design directions for the JIT:
>
> --
>
> #1 (aka MCJIT) - We make a new MCJITStreamer which communicates with
> the JIT engine to arrange to plop code in the right place and update
> various state information.
>
> This is the most obvious approach, is roughly similar to the way the
> existing JIT works, and this is the way the proposed MC-JIT patches
> work (see MCJITState object).
>
> It also happens to not be the approach I want to take. :)
>
>
> #2 (aka FOOJIT) - MC grows a new "pure" backend, which is designed
> around representing everything that "can be run" on a target platform.
> This is very connected to the inherent capabilities of the hardware /
> OS, and is usually a superset** of what the native object format
> (Mach-O, ELF, COFF) can represent.
>
> The "pure" backend defines a hard (but non-stable) object file format
> which is more or less a direct encoding of the native MC APIs (it is
> not stable, so it can directly encode things like FixupKind enum
> values).
>
> I don't have a name for this format, so for now I will call it FOO.
>
> The "MC-JIT" then becomes something more like a "FOO-JIT". It is
> architected as a consumer of "FOO" object files over time. The basic
> architecture is quite simple:
>  (a) Load a module, emit it as a "FOO" object.
>  (b) Load the object into a worklist, scan for undefined symbols,
> dynamically emit more "FOO" modules.
>  (c) Iterate until no undefined symbols remain.
>  (d) Execute code -- if we hit a lazy compilation callback, go back to
> (a).
>
> (**) It more or less *must* be a superset, since object formats
> usually don't bother to represent things which can't be run. Features
> which require OS emulation is an obvious exception. As concrete
> example, consider the implementation of thread local storage. Each
> platform typically will chose an implementation approach and limit its
> format to supporting that, but the hardware itself supports many more
> implementation approaches.
>
> --
>
> I apologize if my description is a bit terse, but I hope the basic
> infrastructure comes through. I will make some pretty diagrams for it
> at some point (hopefully before the next dev mtg, hahaha hmmm....).
>
> Here are the reasons I want to follow approach #2:
>
> 1. It makes the JIT process look much more like the standard
> compilation process. In fact, from the FOOJIT's perspective, it could
> even run the compiler out of process to produce "FOO" object files,
> with no real change in behavior.
>
> This has two main implications:
>  a. We are leveraging much more of the existing infrastructure.
>  b. We can use more of the existing tools to test and debug the JIT.
>
> 2. It forces us to treat the JIT as a separate "subtarget".
>  a. In reality, this is already true. The compiler needs to know it is
> targeting a JIT in terms of what features are available (indirect
> stubs? exception tables? thread local storage?), but the current
> design papers over this. This design forces us to acknowledge that
> fact up front, and should make the architecture more understandable.
>
> 3. It eases testing and debugging.
>  a. We can build new tools to test the FOOJIT, for example, a tool
> that just loads a couple FOO object files and runs them, but without
> needing to do codegen. Since we can already use the existing tools to
> work with the FOO objects, this basically gives us a new testing entry
> point into the JIT.
>
> --
>
> Some caveats of this design:
>
> 1. The initial implementation will probably work very much as
> described, it will actually write "FOO" object files to memory and
> load them.
>
> In practice, we would like to avoid the performance overhead of this
> copy. My plan here is that eventually we would have multiple
> implementations of the FOO object writer, one of which would write to
> the serialized form, but another would splat directly into the process
> memory.
>
> We would allow other fancy things following the same approach, for
> example allow the JIT to pin symbols to their actual addresses, so
> that the assembler can do the optimal relaxation for where the code is
> actually landing in memory.
>
> 2. It requires some more up front work, in that there is more stuff to
> build. However, I feel it is a much stronger design, so I expect this
> to pay off relatively quickly.
>
> 3. Some JIT-tricks become a bit less obvious. For example, in a JIT,
> it is natural when seeing a symbol undefined "bar" to go ahead and see
> if you can find "bar" and immediately generated code for it. You can't
> do that in the FOOJIT model, because you won't know "bar" is undefined
> until you read the object back.
>
> However, in practice one needs to be careful about recursion and
> reentrancy, so you have to take care when trying to do things like
> this. The FOOJIT forces such tricks to go through a proper API (the
> FOO object) which I end up seeing as a feature, not a bug.
> --
>
> And, a final word on API compatibility:
>
> As mentioned before, I have no *plan* to break any existing public
> interface to the JIT. The goal is that we eventually have a strict
> superset of the current functionality.
>
> The actual plan will be to roll out the FOOJIT in tree with some
> option to allow clients to easily pick the implementation. A tentative
> goal would be to have the FOOJIT working well enough in 2.9 so that
> clients can test it against the released LLVM, and that for 2.10
> (*grin*) we can make it the default.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>  - Daniel
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