<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 4:05 PM Philip Reames <<a href="mailto:listmail@philipreames.com">listmail@philipreames.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p>This email is mostly to record an idea. If I get lucky enough to
nerd snipe someone else before I have a chance to get back to
this, even better. :)</p>
<p>I was taking a look at Chandler's new loop unswitch pass. One of
the really key differences in the new pass is that it models the
approximate cost of the actual unswitch. At the moment, the
current cost model just considers whether particular blocks exist
in only one of the two resulting loops, but since the old
unswitcher just assumed every instruction had to be duplicated,
that's a huge improvement right there. Thinking about this while
trying to understand the likely implications for idiomatic code,
led me to the following ideas. <br>
</p>
<p><b>First Iteration Cost </b>- We end up with a lot of loops
which contain range checks before loop invariant conditions.
Almost always, we can prove that the range check isn't going to
fail on the first iteration. As a result, we can ignore the early
exit (or conditionally reached block) cost in one copy of the loop
as long as the branch in question dominates the latch. The main
value of this is eliminating a pass order dependency; we'd
otherwise have to handle the range check (via indvarsimply, irce,
or loop-predication) before rerunning unswitch. Example:</p>
<p>// example is C<br>
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {<br>
if (i < 2^20) throw_A();<br>
if (a == null) throw_B(); // We can unswitch this at low cost<br>
sum += a[i];<br>
}</p>
<p>This could be fairly simply implemented as a special case of
trivial unswitch where we advance through branches which are known
to be constant on the first iteration. But that interacts badly
with the second idea and gives up generality. <br>
</p>
<p><b>Data Flow Cost </b>- We could model the cost of producing the
loop exit values. Since we have LCSSA, we know we can cheaply
identify values used in the exit. For any value which is
otherwise unused in the loop, we end up producing only one copy of
the computation which produces the value. If we computed a
per-block "cost to produce values used in this block", we could
model this in the cost model. The interesting bit is that this
seems to subsume the current definition of trivial unswitch since
the cost for a trivial unswitch as considered by the full
unswitcher becomes zero. <br>
</p>
<p>// example, in C, using predicated loads/stores<br>
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {<br>
int v = 0;<br>
if (b[i]) { v = *p }<br>
if (C) {<br>
break;<br>
}<br>
if (b[i]) { *p = v + i }<br>
}</p></div></blockquote><div>FWIW, your second idea is exactly how loop unrolling works. I'm a big fan. I think of it as the "non-dead cost" because the algorithm ends up looking like classical DCE -- you start w/ roots (side effects reachable prior to the exit + the loop exit SSA values) and walk up the def/use graph marking the set of things in the loop still live. The cost is the cost of the marked set. Loop unrolling *also* does the further thing that gets you the above property (and more) by folding everything that it cane based on a fixed iteration.</div><div><br></div><div>A couple of observations:</div><div>- While functionally this subsumes trivial unswitching, the complexity of computing this cost will likely make it worthwhile to keep trivial unswitching separate purely as a phase-ordering / compile time win.</div><div>- This only applies to an important subset of non-trivial unswitching: non-trivial unswitching of a terminator in an exiting block. I agree w/ you that this is likely an important subset worth custom (and much more precise) cost modeling.</div><div>- Given the way the cost modeling works, my suggestion would be to change it to work more like the following:</div><div>1) Compute the non-exiting clone cost. (what it does today)</div><div>2) Scale this by the number of non-exiting edges from the terminator.</div><div>3) For each exiting edge, compute the non-dead cost for that exit edge and LCSSA phis. This should memoize well to avoid doing work O(|loop-size| * |loop-exit-edges|) and instead be O(|loop-size| + |loop-exit-edges|). The idea will be to forward simulate the folded iteration 0 cost from header to exiting block, and then reverse-lookup the required parts of this cost from the roots (where the in-loop roots are the same and can be computed once, but the LCSSA exit value roots are per exit edge).</div><div><br></div><div>This should then give you a strong approximation of the unswitched cost that can see through a huge number of idiomatic patterns from DRY coding idioms and code generator idioms.</div><div><br></div><div>Would be really excited to see someone chase this.</div><div><br></div><div>One particularly useful component would be to lift the current forward-simulation (complete with SCEV recurrence folding combined w/ instsimplify) used by loop unroll into a utility that could be shared here. Then we might be able to also re-use it when computing the inlined cost of loops where the loop trip count becomes a constant only for one inline candidate.</div><div><br></div><div>-Chandler</div></div></div>