[llvm-dev] Strange regalloc behaviour: one more available register causes much worse allocation

Quentin Colombet via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Wed Dec 5 10:21:58 PST 2018


+ Marina, maybe she would have ideas on how to improve the eviction
chain detection.

Hi John,

What you're seeing is indeed another instance of eviction chain
madness that Marina improved with the splitCanCauseEvictionChain but
is still a problem.
The problem with what you're suggesting is that it will improve this
instance, but I am pretty sure it will regress some others.
Unfortunately, this is the case we whatever change we do in that space
though.

> Does anyone know where and how exactly these bundles are decided?

I have to relearn this every time there is something wrong happening
there... Needless to say this is complicated! IIRC the bundles are
chosen using an Hopfield network, which in short is a kind of neural
network that is guarantee to converge to a local minimum. As you could
imagine, there is little tweak you can do here and maybe its time to
rethink that approach.

Cheers,
-Quentin
Le mer. 5 déc. 2018 à 09:50, John Brawn via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> a écrit :
>
> enableAdvancedRASplitCost() does the same thing as ConsiderLocalIntervalCost, but as a
>
> subtarget option instead of a command-line option, and as I’ve said it doesn’t help because
>
> it’s a non-local interval causing the eviction chain (RAGreedy::splitCanCauseEvictionChain
>
> only considers the local interval for a single block, and it’s unclear to me how to make it
>
> handle a non-local interval).
>
>
>
> John
>
>
>
> From: Nirav Davé [mailto:niravd at google.com]
> Sent: 05 December 2018 17:14
> To: John Brawn
> Cc: llvm-dev; nd
> Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Strange regalloc behaviour: one more available register causes much worse allocation
>
>
>
> This has cropped up before in X86 (https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26810 / https://reviews.llvm.org/rL316295), and there's at least a partial mitigation
>
> (I recently ran into an eviction change on X86 when trying variants of a MachineScheduler change, but couldn't find a reproduction post the landed patch).
>
>
>
> I suggest you try enabling enableAdvancedRASplitCost() for ARM and seeing if that helps.
>
>
>
> -Nirav
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 10:46 AM John Brawn via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Preamble
> --------
>
> While working on an IR-level optimisation completely unrelated to register
> allocation I happened to trigger some really strange register allocator
> behaviour causing a large regression in bzip2 in spec2006. I've been trying
> to fix that regression before getting the optimisation patch committed, because
> I don't want to regress spec2006, but I'm basically fumbling in the dark because
> I don't yet know how or why the register allocator is making the decisions it
> does and I thought I'd send an email to see if anyone has any advice.
>
>
> The problem
> -----------
>
> Attached are (zipped, as llvm-dev has a 100kb message limit):
>  * bzip2_regression.ll (reduced from bzip2 in spec2006 after being compiled with
>    some patches that I'm working on) which demonstrates the problem.
>  * 0001-AArch64-JumpTableDest-scratch-register-isn-t-earlycl.patch which causes
>    the problem.
>  * without_patch_regalloc.txt, the regalloc debug log for llc -mcpu=cortex-a57
>    bzip2_regression.ll without the patch applied.
>  * with_patch_regalloc.txt, the same log but with the patch applied.
> Note that the patch is not correct, but it happens to be a useful way of
> provoking the problem.
>
> Without the patch generating assembly with llc -mcpu=cortex-a57 everything looks
> fine, but with the patch we get this (which comes from the block
> bb.17.switchdest13):
>
> .LBB0_16:
>         mov     x29, x24
>         mov     w24, w20
>         mov     w20, w19
>         mov     w19, w7
>         mov     w7, w6
>         mov     w6, w5
>         mov     w5, w2
>         mov     x2, x18
>         mov     w18, w15
>         orr     w15, wzr, #0x1c
>         str     w15, [x8, #8]
>         mov     w0, wzr
>         mov     w15, w18
>         mov     x18, x2
>         mov     w2, w5
>         mov     w5, w6
>         mov     w6, w7
>         mov     w7, w19
>         mov     w19, w20
>         mov     w20, w24
>         mov     x24, x29
>         b       .LBB0_3
>
> It looks like the orr and str have barged in and said "we're using w15!" and all
> the rest of the registers have meekly moved out of the way and then moved back
> again at the and. If the orr and str had used w29 instead then none of this
> would have happened.
>
> What the patch does is make one of the input operands to the JumpTableDest32
> pseudo-instruction be not marked as earlyclobber, or in other words it means we
> have one extra register free compared to without the patch. And you would
> expect that more free registers = better register allocation, but in this case
> it appears we don't.
>
> Note: this problem can happen without the patch, but the test case is much much
> larger and manifested itself as -fno-omit-frame-pointer giving a better
> allocation than -fomit-frame-pointer. This patch was actually my first attempt
> at fixing this (as I'd noticed that we were unnecessarily keeping an extra
> register live across the JumpTableDest8).
>
>
> What's going on
> ---------------
>
> What this block looks like after live range splitting has happened is:
>
>   7352B bb.17.switchdest13:
>         ; predecessors: %bb.3
>           successors: %bb.30(0x80000000); %bb.30(100.00%)
>
>   7360B   %390:gpr32 = COPY $wzr
>   7364B   %434:gpr64 = COPY %432:gpr64
>   7368B   %429:gpr32 = COPY %427:gpr32
>   7376B   %424:gpr32 = COPY %422:gpr32
>   7384B   %419:gpr32 = COPY %417:gpr32
>   7392B   %414:gpr32 = COPY %412:gpr32
>   7400B   %409:gpr32 = COPY %407:gpr32
>   7408B   %404:gpr32 = COPY %402:gpr32
>   7416B   %399:gpr64 = COPY %397:gpr64
>   7424B   %394:gpr32 = COPY %392:gpr32
>   7528B   %253:gpr32 = MOVi32imm 28
>   7536B   STRWui %253:gpr32, %182:gpr64common, 2 :: (store 4 into %ir.106, align 8)
>   7752B   %392:gpr32 = COPY %394:gpr32
>   7756B   %397:gpr64 = COPY %399:gpr64
>   7764B   %402:gpr32 = COPY %404:gpr32
>   7768B   %407:gpr32 = COPY %409:gpr32
>   7776B   %412:gpr32 = COPY %414:gpr32
>   7780B   %417:gpr32 = COPY %419:gpr32
>   7788B   %422:gpr32 = COPY %424:gpr32
>   7792B   %427:gpr32 = COPY %429:gpr32
>   7800B   %432:gpr64 = COPY %434:gpr64
>   7808B   %373:gpr64sp = IMPLICIT_DEF
>   7816B   %374:gpr64sp = IMPLICIT_DEF
>   8048B   B %bb.30
>
> Looking at the debug output of the register allocator, the sequence of events
> which kicks things off is
>  %223 assigned to w0
>  %283 evicts %381 from w15
>  %381 requeued for second round
>  %253 assigned to w15
>  %381 split for w15 in 4 bundles into %391-%395
>   %391, %392, %395 are not local intervals
>   %393 is the local interval for bb.11.switchdest09
>   %394 is the local interval for bb.17.switchdest13
>  %392 assigned to w15
>  %391 evicts %376 from w18
>  %394 assigned to w18
>  %376 split into %396-%400
> and then %396 evicts something which is split into something which evicts
> something etc. until we're done.
>
> Looking at what happens when this patch isn't applied the difference is:
>  %223 cannot be assigned to w0, evicts %381 from w15
>  %381 requeued for second round
>  %283 assigned to w15
>  %253 assigned to w15
>  %381 split for w15 in 1 bundle into %391 and %392
>   Neither is a local interval
>  %391 evicts %380 from w2
>  %392 assigned to w2
>
> So it looks like the difference is that with the patch we happen to split %381
> in a way that causes the split intervals to be allocated such that we get a pair
> of copies in bb.17.switchdest13, and this causes a cascade effect where we
> repeatedly do the same thing with a whole load of other registers.
>
>
> Possible Solutions
> ------------------
>
> So there's two ways I can think of to fix this:
>  * Make %381 be split in the same way that it is without the patch, which I
>    think means deciding that there's only 1 bundle for w15. Does anyone know
>    where and how exactly these bundles are decided?
>  * Try and change how evicted / split registers are allocated in some way.
>    Things I've tried:
>   * In RAGreedy::enqueue reduce the score of unspillable local intervals, and in
>     RAGreedy::evictInterference put evicted registers into stage RS_Split
>     immediately. This causes %381 to be split immediately instead of being
>     requeued, and then makes %391 have a higher score than %253 causing it to
>     be allocated before it. This works, but ends up causing an extra spill.
>   * In RAGreedy::splitAroundRegion put global intervals into stage RS_Split
>     immediately. This makes the chain of evictions after %396 not happen, but
>     that gives us one extra spill and we still get one pair of copies in
>     bb.17.switchdest13.
>   * In RAGreedy::evictInterference put evicted registers into a new RS_Evicted
>     stage, which is like RS_Assign but can't evict anything. This seemed to give
>     OK results but was a mess and I didn't understand what I was doing, so I
>     threw it away.
>   * Turn on the ConsiderLocalIntervalCost option, as it's supposed to help with
>     eviction chains like this. Unfortunately it doesn't work as it's a non-local
>     interval that's causing the eviction chain. I tried making it also handle
>     non-local intervals, but couldn't figure out how to.
>   * Turn on TRI->reverseLocalAssignment(). This seemed to work, but I'm not sure
>     why and reading the description of that it may not be the correct solution
>     (it's described as being an option to reduce the time the register allocator
>     takes, not to give better allocation). The benchmark results are also
>     overall slightly worse.
>
> Any ideas on what the right approach to fixing this is?
>
> John
>
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