[cfe-dev] OpenCL & SPIR specific types - proposal and patch

Tue Oct 9 11:43:58 PDT 2012

From: Tanya Lattner [mailto:lattner at apple.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 11:30 AM
To: Villmow, Micah
Cc: Benyei, Guy; cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu; Anton.Lokhmotov at arm.com
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] OpenCL & SPIR specific types - proposal and patch

On Oct 4, 2012, at 1:14 PM, "Villmow, Micah" <Micah.Villmow at amd.com<mailto:Micah.Villmow at amd.com>> wrote:

There needs to be a way to differentiate between an integer and a sampler by only looking at the type. The sampler itself is an opaque type in OpenCL. The only requirement is that it is initialized with a 32bit unsigned integer, not that the type itself is an integer.

I understand that the spec doesn't require it to be a 32 bit integer, but if you are only ever assigning it a 32 bit integer, it doesn't make any sense to have the extra inttoptr instruction.

Secondly, your idea of differentiating an integer and sampler by type alone is then based upon the name of the type that you are pointing to and not actually the type itself. Anything based upon names can be risky. There was a point in time where the linker was not properly merging structures that were identical and therefore renaming them. It makes much more sense to attach metadata to samplers and images to denote what is what.
[Villmow, Micah] Metadata isn't possible because you can't attach metadata to arguments.
Take these functions:
Kernel void foo(sampler_t a, int b)
{
}
Kernel void foo(int a, int b)
{
}
In LLVMIR with sampler as i32, they are both the same function, but they are fundamentally different and have to be handled differently(not only at the compiler level, but also at the runtime level). On a 32bit system, on the runtime side, the size of a sampler_t object is 4 bytes, on a 64bit system it is 8 bytes, but as an i32, its always 4 bytes.

Another problem is this case:
Module 1:
int foo(sampler_t a, int b)
{
Return 0;
}
Module 2:
int foo(int a, int b)
{
Return 0;
}
Module 3:
Kernel void bar(global int* a, sampler_t b)
{
*a = foo(b, *a);
}

Linking Module 1 and 3 together is fine, linking module 2 and 3 together should produce a linker error. If a sampler is an i32, they both are accepted since they have the same signature.

I agree that the opaque pointer with a specific name isn't the best solution, but unless we add these as fundamental LLVM types, I don't know of a better way to handle this. I however think relying on metadata for information that is required for correctness is wrong(metadata should not affect correctness) and differentiating if an i32 is a sampler or not based on its use is not the right approach either.

The image types being pointers I am fine with as there isn't any other way to do those.

-Tanya

Micah

From: Tanya Lattner [mailto:lattner at apple.com<http://apple.com>]
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 11:49 AM
To: Benyei, Guy
Cc: cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu<mailto:cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu>; Villmow, Micah; Anton.Lokhmotov at arm.com<mailto:Anton.Lokhmotov at arm.com>
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] OpenCL & SPIR specific types - proposal and patch

I'm hoping to have comments on this patch tomorrow, but since I have proposed several patches to Clang for the sampler type (and have another in revision).. can you explain why you want to change the type from an integer to a pointer?

-Tanya

On Oct 3, 2012, at 8:06 AM, "Benyei, Guy" <guy.benyei at intel.com<mailto:guy.benyei at intel.com>> wrote:

I'd like to renew the discussion about making the OpenCL specific types first class citizens in Clang.

I think this change is required by the OpenCL specifications, since these type names are keywords of the OpenCL C language.
This change is also needed in order to enable efficient checking of OpenCL restrictions on these types (OpenCL 1.2 spec, section 6.9).
Furthermore, the proposed change will turn these types to pointers to opaque types, which means that it will hide the actual (vendor specific) implementation, so the OpenCL vendors using Clang will be able to implement these types in their own way.

This change would also be a basis for the implementation of SPIR generation by Clang. The SPIR discussion and spec can be found here:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-September/024132.html
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-September/024178.html

Earlier discussion about the OpenCL types was started by Anton Lokhmotov:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2011-May/015297.html
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2011-April/014741.html
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2011-March/014118.html
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2011-March/014121.html

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