<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Apr 6, 2016, at 4:53 PM, Mehdi Amini via llvm-dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" class="">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">On Apr 6, 2016, at 4:41 PM, Peter Collingbourne <<a href="mailto:peter@pcc.me.uk" class="">peter@pcc.me.uk</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">Hi all,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I'd like to propose changes to how we do promotion of global values in ThinLTO. The goal here is to make it possible to pre-compile parts of the translation unit to native code at compile time. For example, if we know that:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">1) A function is a leaf function, so it will never import any other functions, and</div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">It still may be imported somewhere else right?</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="">2) The function's instruction count falls above a threshold specified at compile time, so it will never be imported.</div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">It won’t be imported, but unless it is a “leaf” it may import and inline itself.</div></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Oh there was an “and”, so forget about my comments above, since this is acknowledged.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>— </div><div>Mehdi</div><div><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="">or</div><div class="">3) The compile-time threshold is zero, so there is no possibility of functions being imported (What's the utility of this? Consider a program transformation that requires whole-program information, such as CFI. During development, the import threshold may be set to zero in order to minimize the incremental link time while still providing the same CFI enforcement that would be used in production builds of the application.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">then the function's body will not be affected by link-time decisions, and we might as well produce its object code at compile time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Reading this last sentence, it seems exactly the “non-LTO” case?</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="">This will also allow the object code to be shared between linkage units (this should hopefully help solve a major scalability problem for Chromium, as that project contains a large number of test binaries based on common libraries).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">This can be done with a change to the intermediate object file format. We can represent object files as native code containing statically compiled functions and global data in the .text,. data, .rodata (etc.) sections, with an .llvmbc section (or, I suppose, "__LLVM, __bitcode" when targeting Mach-O) containing bitcode for functions to be compiled at link time.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">In order to make this work, we need to make sure that references from link-time compiled functions to statically compiled functions work correctly in the case where the statically compiled function has internal linkage. We can do this by promoting every global value with internal linkage, using a hash of the external names (as I mentioned in [1]).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I imagine that for some linkers, it may not be possible to deal with this scheme. For example, I did some investigation last year and discovered that I could not use the gold plugin interface to load a native object file if we had already claimed it as an IR file. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that ld64 has similar problems.</div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I suspect ld64 would need to be update to handle this scheme. Somehow it need to be able to extract the object from the section.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Otherwise this should work, but I suspect the applicability (leaving CFI aside) may not concern that many functions, so I’m not sure about the impact.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">— </div><div class="">Mehdi</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">In cases where we completely control the linker (e.g. lld), we can easily support this scheme, as the linker can directly do whatever it wants. But for linkers that cannot support this, I suggest that we promote consistently under ThinLTO rather than having different promotion schemes for different linkers, in order to reduce overall complexity.</div><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks for your feedback!</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks,</div>--<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">-- <div class="">Peter</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">[1] <a href="http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-April/098062.html" class="">http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-April/098062.html</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br class="" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">_______________________________________________</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">LLVM Developers mailing list</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><a href="http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev</a></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>