Disable arm-gepopt by default

James Molloy james at jamesmolloy.co.uk
Tue Apr 21 04:06:58 PDT 2015


Hi Michael, Gerolf,

The main goal of this optimization was to reduce the number of
multiply-adds emitted when complex GEPs are used. With regards to SPEC,
this is particularly prevalent in sjeng and gobmk (although we don't just
care about SPEC and there were plenty of other places we caught this idiom).

The pass is actively reducing the number of multiply-adds in gobmk:

$ llc engine.ll -O3 -mllvm -aarch64-gep-opt=false -o - |& grep madd | wc -l
 297

$ llc engine.ll -O3 -mllvm -aarch64-gep-opt=true -o - |& grep madd | wc -l
 158

So it demonstrably is making at least some code better.

I was able to reproduce your twofish example. Twofish, like most crypto
algorithms, has a pattern repeated many times so the problem could just be
down to one pattern producing one more instruction, which it turns out is
exactly the case.

The problem is that with gep-opt enabled, we're associating shifts and
constants the other way around.

With gep-opt disabled (synthetic code example):
   add x0, x0, #72
   ldr x0, [x1, x0, lsl #2]

With gep-opt enabled:
   add x0, x1, x0, lsl #2
   ldr x0, [x0, #72]

This is actually fine, until another expression reuses a different shift
with the same offset:

With gep-opt disabled:
   add x0, x0, #72
   ldr x0, [x1, x0, lsl #2]
   ldr x2, [x1, x0, lsl #3]

With gep-opt enabled:
   add x0, x1, x0, lsl #2
   add x2, x1, x0, lsl #3
   ldr x0, [x0, #72]
   ldr x2, [x0, #72]

Amusingly, I saw the opposite behaviour on AArch32 on a different testcase
and came to the conclusion that expressions with correlated immediate
offsets and identical shift amounts were more likely than expressions with
correlated shift amounts and identical immediate offsets, but that's a
different story.

Anyway, the reason this is happening is because we're not running
reassociate after GEP expansion. If we run reassociate it all goes away,
it's a one-line fix.

The two testcases that were disabled - well, they weren't really disabled,
but the behaviour was changed for them. I put that down to a bug in the
SeparateConstOffsetFromGEP pass, where it tries to separate a GEP with only
one variadic offset:

  GEP i8* %base, i32 %offset

Nothing beneficial can come of that, so I've got, again, a single line
patch to fix this. I'll push both patches upstream just as soon as I verify
them.

So in summary, I don't see any need to disable this pass. It's doing good
work, it just has one or two bugs.

Cheers,

James

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015 at 05:27 Michael Zolotukhin <mzolotukhin at apple.com>
wrote:

> Hi Tim and others,
>
> So, the entire discussion is moving around the assumption that this pass
> is beneficial in some cases, but we don’t have such data. Please note that
> I don’t want to say that the assumption is wrong, but as far as I
> understand, only Hao observed some gains. Thus, until we hear from him, we
> have real slow downs versus presumable gains.
>
> As for the looking into the code later - I’m not an expert in this area,
> and I don’t even have a motivational example for this optimization, so I’d
> barely be a right person for it. I’d be glad to assist with collecting some
> additional data/running tests if that might help though.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael
>
>
> > On Apr 20, 2015, at 8:40 PM, Tim Northover <t.p.northover at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 20 April 2015 at 20:34, Gerolf Hoflehner <ghoflehner at apple.com>
> wrote:
> >> It shouldn’t come across as ‘extreme’.
> >
> > The "extreme" part wasn't so much the tentative disabling as "Could
> > you and/or Hao take this on after the code is disabled/backed out?". I
> > realise it wasn't an ultimatum, but it could very easily turn into
> > "we're washing our hands of this", which I'd object to.
> >
> > I assume the pass was committed with some kind of metric that it
> > improved, and now we have a counter-example. It's down to everyone to
> > decide what the best way to proceed is.
> >
> > Cheers.
> >
> > Tim.
> >
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>
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