[llvm-dev] Significant code difference with a split call to opt

[Sébastien Michelland via llvm-dev]

Hi,

This answer is a bit slow; I tried to look into the sequence details but 
250 passes plus the complex bitcode of test suite examples makes this 
pretty hard.

In the meantime I stumbled upon llvm-diff which abstracts away the most 
significant difference, namely instruction renaming. It also ignores 
function attributes so calling conventions are silently unified; but at 
least it gives empty diffs when comparing the two methods. This means 
that my performance differences are mostly measurement errors...

Some of the differences might be "normal", eg. caused by randomized data 
structures. I don't have that much experience with LLVM code so I'm not 
sure how probable this is.

I'll stick to llvm-diff for now and maybe come back to this when I have 
a clearer understanding of the pass management process. ^^

Thanks for your time and help!
Sébastien Michelland

On 6/19/19 11:42 AM, Hiroshi Yamauchi wrote:
> Passing -print-after-all to opt should print the IR after each pass. 
> That may help figure out what's going on.
> 
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 1:30 PM Sébastien Michelland via llvm-dev 
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org <mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     I reproduced the test on many individual files and got very variable
>     results... it seems the computer's workload when running the test suite
>     influenced the execution speed a lot more than standard deviation
>     shows.
>     I'll withdraw the performance claim until I can get consistent results
>     (changed subject line), apologies for the confusion.
> 
>     What I can still show easily is that the code generated by these two
>     methods is different (which is already weird). For a simple example,
>     grab a copy of bilateral_grid.bc:
> 
> 
>     <https://github.com/llvm/llvm-test-suite/blob/master/Bitcode/Benchmarks/Halide/bilateral_grid/bilateral_grid.bc>
> 
>     Then you can generate my sequences with [opt -O3 -debug-pass=Arguments]
>     and diff the outputs. Please see the attached script.
> 
>     The differences seem to be mainly on variable indices (are they
>     randomized?); on some test (namely jacobi-2d-imper) I have seen calling
>     convention differences.
> 
>     I'd like to optimize programs by greedily selecting optimizations,
>     making a call to opt at each step. If I don't have equality between the
>     two methods, I can't be sure that the sequence I'm building will make
>     much sense.
> 
>     Sébastien Michelland
> 
>     On 6/14/19 4:49 PM, David Greene wrote:
>      > Do you have more information?  What were the exact command lines you
>      > used?  Do you have an example program that demonstrates the
>     difference
>      > than you can share?
>      >
>      >                        -David
>      >
>      > Sébastien Michelland via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>     <mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> writes:
>      >
>      >> Hello list,
>      >>
>      >> This is a follow-up from a question I asked last month. I'm
>     evaluating
>      >> the performance of two pass sequences that resemble (but are
>     not) -O3.
>      >>
>      >> With -O3, -debug-pass=Structure prints several independent
>     blocks that
>      >> seem to represent several calls to opt. I focused on two of these
>      >> blocks, say S1 and S2, and compared the following optimization
>      >> methods:
>      >>
>      >> 1. Executing them separately, ie. opt -S1 | opt -S2
>      >> 2. Executing them in a single call, ie. opt -S1 -S2
>      >>
>      >> I built the test suite with each of these configurations, then
>      >> measured the performance of the compiled programs with perf, over 10
>      >> runs.
>      >>
>      >> I'm attaching a plot of the speedup of method 1 over method 2. The
>      >> intervals represent the standard deviation of the performance
>      >> measures.
>      >>
>      >> As you can see, programs compiled with method 1 are significantly
>      >> slower than their counterparts compiled with method 2. However, if
>      >> passes were applied in order using function composition, their
>      >> performance should be the same.
>      >>
>      >> I'd like to know if there is a way to recover this property in the
>      >> pass manager, or at least explain the difference. If needed, I can
>      >> provide scripts to reproduce the measurements.
>      >>
>      >> Thanks,
>      >> Sébastien Michelland
>      >>
>      >>
>      >> _______________________________________________
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