[llvm-dev] Aggregate load/stores

mats petersson via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Mon Aug 17 14:35:05 PDT 2015


Even if I turn to -O0 [in other words, no optimisation passes at all], it
takes the same amount of time.

The time is spent in

  12.94%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SDNode::use_iterator::operator==
   7.68%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SDNode::use_iterator::operator*
   7.53%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SelectionDAG::ReplaceAllUsesOfValueWith
   7.28%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SDNode::use_iterator::operator++
   5.59%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SDNode::use_iterator::operator!=
   4.65%  lacsap   lacsap               [.] llvm::SDNode::hasNUsesOfValue
   3.82%  lacsap   lacsap               [.] llvm::SDUse::getResNo
   2.33%  lacsap   lacsap               [.] llvm::SDValue::getResNo
   2.19%  lacsap   lacsap               [.] llvm::SDUse::getNext
   1.32%  lacsap   lacsap               [.]
llvm::SDNode::use_iterator::getUse
   1.28%  lacsap   lacsap               [.] llvm::SDUse::getUser

Here's the LLVM IR generated:
https://gist.github.com/Leporacanthicus/9b662f88e0c4a471e51a

And as can be seen here -O0 produces "no passes":
https://github.com/Leporacanthicus/lacsap/blob/master/lacsap.cpp#L76

../lacsap -no-memcpy -tt longcompile.pas  -O0
Time for Parse 0.502 ms
Time for Analyse 0.015 ms
Time for Compile 1.038 ms
Time for CreateObject 48134.541 ms
Time for CreateBinary 48179.720 ms
Time for Compile 48187.351 ms

And before someone says "but you are running a debug build", if I run the
"production", it does speed things up quite nicely, about 3x, but still
takes 17 seconds vs 45ms with that build of the compiler.


../lacsap -no-memcpy -tt longcompile.pas  -O0
Time for Parse 0.937 ms
Time for Analyse 0.005 ms
Time for Compile 0.559 ms
Time for CreateObject 17241.177 ms
Time for CreateBinary 17286.701 ms
Time for Compile 17289.187 ms

../lacsap -tt longcompile.pas
Time for Parse 0.274 ms
Time for Analyse 0.004 ms
Time for Compile 0.258 ms
Time for CreateObject 7.504 ms
Time for CreateBinary 45.405 ms
Time for Compile 46.670 ms

I believe I know what happens: The compiler is trying to figure out the
best order of instructions, and looks at N^2 instructions that are pretty
much independently executable with no code or data dependencies. So it
iterates over a vast number of possible permutations, only to find that
they are all pretty much equally good/bad... But like I said earlier,
although I'm a professional software engineer, compilers are just a
hobby-project for me, and I only started a little over a year back, so I
make no pretense to know the answer. Using memcpy instead solves this
problem, as it

--
Mats

On 17 August 2015 at 22:05, Mehdi Amini <mehdi.amini at apple.com> wrote:

> Hi Mats,
>
> The performance issue seems like a potential different issue.
> Can you send the input IR in both cases and the list of passes you are
> running?
>
> Thanks,
>
>> Mehdi
>
>
> On Aug 17, 2015, at 2:02 PM, mats petersson <mats at planetcatfish.com>
> wrote:
>
> I've definitely "run into this problem", and I would very much love to
> remove my kludges [that are incomplete, because I keep finding places where
> I need to modify the code-gen to "fix" the same problem - this is probably
> par for the course from a complete amateur compiler writer and someone that
> has only spent the last 14 months working (as a hobby) with LLVM].
>
> So whilst I can't contribute much on the "what is the right solution" and
> "how do we solve this", I would very much like to see something that allows
> the user of LLVM to use load/store withing things like "is my thing that
> I'm storing big, if so don't generate a load, use a memcpy instead". Not
> only does this make the usage of LLVM harder, it also causes slow
> compilation [perhaps this is a separte problem, but I have a simple program
> that copies a large struct a few times, and if I turn off my "use memcpy
> for large things", the compile time gets quite a lot longer - approx 1000x,
> and 48 seconds is a long time to compile 37 lines of relatively straight
> forward code - even the Pascal compiler on PDP-11/70 that I used at my
> school in 1980's was capable of doing more than 1 line per second, and it
> didn't run anywhere near 2.5GHz and had 20-30 users anytime I could use
> it...]
>
> ../lacsap -no-memcpy -tt longcompile.pas
> Time for Parse 0.657 ms
> Time for Analyse 0.018 ms
> Time for Compile 1.248 ms
> Time for CreateObject 48803.263 ms
> Time for CreateBinary 48847.631 ms
> Time for Compile 48854.064 ms
>
> compared with:
> ../lacsap -tt longcompile.pas
> Time for Parse 0.455 ms
> Time for Analyse 0.013 ms
> Time for Compile 1.138 ms
> Time for CreateObject 44.627 ms
> Time for CreateBinary 82.758 ms
> Time for Compile 95.797 ms
>
> wc longcompile.pas
>  37  84 410 longcompile.pas
>
> Source here:
> https://github.com/Leporacanthicus/lacsap/blob/master/test/longcompile.pas
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_Leporacanthicus_lacsap_blob_master_test_longcompile.pas&d=BQMFaQ&c=eEvniauFctOgLOKGJOplqw&r=v-ruWq0KCv2O3thJZiK6naxuXK8mQHZUmGq5FBtAmZ4&m=UIvJWH1sfAjqtDn-zhUTQftRiaPqHmuoDU98fROzDfg&s=6BM4NTaxZDH8Gd6oekl1GjVZGnKT-5VY6_8gGb61Nkk&e=>
>
>
> --
> Mats
>
> On 17 August 2015 at 21:18, deadal nix via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> OK, what about that plan :
>>
>> Slice the aggregate into a serie of valid loads/stores for non atomic
>> ones.
>> Use big scalar for atomic/volatile ones.
>> Try to generate memcpy or memmove when possible ?
>>
>>
>> 2015-08-17 12:16 GMT-07:00 deadal nix <deadalnix at gmail.com>:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 2015-08-17 11:26 GMT-07:00 Mehdi Amini <mehdi.amini at apple.com>:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 17, 2015, at 12:13 AM, deadal nix via llvm-dev <
>>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 2015-08-16 23:21 GMT-07:00 David Majnemer <david.majnemer at gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Because a solution which doesn't generalize is not a very powerful
>>>>> solution.  What happens when somebody says that they want to use atomics +
>>>>> large aggregate loads and stores? Give them yet another, different answer?
>>>>> That would mean our earlier, less general answer, approach was either a
>>>>> bandaid (bad) or the new answer requires a parallel code path in their
>>>>> frontend (worse).
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> +1 with David’s approach: making thing incrementally better is fine *as
>>>> long as* the long term direction is identified. Small incremental changes
>>>> that makes things slightly better in the short term but drives us away of
>>>> the long term direction is not good.
>>>>
>>>> Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the current patch is not good,
>>>> just that it does not seem clear to me that the long term direction has
>>>> been identified, which explain why some can be nervous about adding stuff
>>>> prematurely.
>>>> And I’m not for the status quo, while I can’t judge it definitively
>>>> myself, I even bugged David last month to look at this revision and try to
>>>> identify what is really the long term direction and how to make your (and
>>>> other) frontends’ life easier.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> As long as there is something to be done. Concern has been raised for
>>> very large aggregate (64K, 1Mb) but there is no way a good codegen can come
>>> out of these anyway. I don't know of any machine that have 1Mb of register
>>> available to tank the load. Even I we had a good way to handle it in
>>> InstCombine, the backend would have no capability to generate something
>>> nice for it anyway. Most aggregates are small and there is no good excuse
>>> to not do anything to handle them because someone could generate gigantic
>>> ones that won't map nicely to the hardware anyway.
>>>
>>> By that logic, SROA should not exists as one could generate gigantic
>>> aggregate as well (in fact, SROA fail pretty badly on large aggregates).
>>>
>>> The second concern raised is for atomic/volatile, which needs to be
>>> handled by the optimizer differently anyway, so is mostly irrelevant here.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> clang has many developer behind it, some of them paid to work on it.
>>>> That s simply not the case for many others.
>>>>
>>>> But to answer your questions :
>>>>  - Per field load/store generate more loads/stores than necessary in
>>>> many cases. These can't be aggregated back because of padding.
>>>>  - memcpy only work memory to memory. It is certainly usable in some
>>>> cases, but certainly do not cover all uses.
>>>>
>>>> I'm willing to do the memcpy optimization in InstCombine (in fact,
>>>> things would not degenerate into so much bikescheding, that would already
>>>> be done).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Calling out “bikescheding” what other devs think is what keeps the
>>>> quality of the project high is unlikely to help your patch go through, it’s
>>>> probably quite the opposite actually.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I understand the desire to keep quality high. That's is not where the
>>> problem is. The problem lies into discussing actual proposal against
>>> hypothetical perfect ones that do not exists.
>>>
>>>
>>
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