[llvm-dev] Performance degradation on ARMv7 (cortex-a9)

[Grang, Mandeep Singh via llvm-dev]

Thanks Bradley.

I see that the features set in /ARM.td/ get written to the generated 
file /<build>/llvm/lib/Target/ARM/ARMGenSubtargetInfo.inc./ Here the 
ProcA9 features appear in /ARMFeatureKV/ table:

/{ "a9", "Cortex-A9 ARM processors", { ARM::ProcA9 }, { 
*ARM::FeatureFP16* } },

/With your change, the features for ProcA9 in the above entry are 
empty.//This ARMFeatureKV table is then read in MC/MCSubtargetInfo.cpp 
in the getFeatures() function.

Thanks,
Mandeep

On 2/24/2016 2:42 AM, Bradley Smith wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> The idea behind that change was to make ARM.td clearer, that is, 
> adding architecture features to new architecture subtarget features, 
> and to have the CPUs inherit from this. ProcA9 (and similar) from what 
> I could tell were only being used for their enum value in making 
> codegen decisions, hence I moved all of the features they inherit over 
> to the actual CPUs for clarity, the idea being that all features a 
> given target uses come from a combination of the architecture it 
> inherits from and the target itself, not any intermediary features 
> like ProcA9.
>
> I’m not aware of any place where ProcA9 is getting used to get 
> subtarget features like this, and after a quick look I still can’t 
> find anything. Where exactly are you seeing ProcA9 being used to get 
> features? Even so, the cortex-a9 processer model itself inherits 
> FeatureFP16 now so I would expect it to use FP16, unless you’re not 
> using cortex-a9 directly? (In which case all CPUs that used to inherit 
> ProcA9 now need to inherit all of the features ProcA9 used to inherit 
> as well as ProcA9, which is what I did in the change you mention).
>
> Regards,
>
> Bradley Smith
>
> *From:*Grang, Mandeep Singh [mailto:mgrang at codeaurora.org]
> *Sent:* 24 February 2016 03:16
> *To:* Bradley Smith
> *Cc:* llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> *Subject:* Performance degradation on ARMv7 (cortex-a9)
>
>  Hi Bradley,
>
> I was doing some performance analysis for ARMv7 (cortex-a9) and I 
> noticed that one of my benchmarks degraded by 93%. I have tracked the 
> regression down to the following commit by you:
> /
> commit 7c1b77248baaeafec5d6433c3d1da9a2e2b69595
> Author: Bradley Smith <bradley.smith at arm.com> 
> <mailto:bradley.smith at arm.com>
> Date:   Mon Nov 16 11:10:19 2015 +0000
>     [ARM] Introduce subtarget features per ARM architecture.
>     This allows for accurate architecture targeting as well as removing
>     duplicate information (hardcoded feature strings) from MCTargetDesc./
>
> I see that in lib/Target/ARM/ARM.td all the features have been removed 
> from Proc definition (e.g.: ProcA9) and added to ProcessorModel 
> definition (e.g.: ProcessorModel<"cortex-a9").
> But I find that the features from Proc are still being read and set in 
> MCSubtargetInfo through the ARMFeatureKV table. So if the Proc is 
> empty the corresponding feature is not being set.
> In my case, if I add FeatureFP16 back to the ProcA9 definition in 
> ARM.td I get back all the lost performance.
>
> Could you please give me some insight on how, after your change, do 
> the Proc features get correctly set in MCSubtargetInfo and other 
> places which access Proc?
>
> Thanks,
> Mandeep
>

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