[LLVMdev] Adding support to LLVM for data & code layout (needed by GHC)

[Eugene Toder]

Yes, the global structure is constant. This is indeed a side-table.
Overriding section of global to be in text is simple -- LLVM already
supports section attribute on globals and functions. However we also
need a specific ordering in text.
With some extra work this ordering can be achieved with gnu linker (I
posted example implementation earlier) without any changes to LLVM, so
the main points for having a direct support for side-tables in LLVM is
1) Not relying on external tool
2) Optimizer issues

Eugene

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 10:35 PM, Andrew Lenharth <andrewl at lenharth.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Eugene Toder <eltoder at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Let me point out that projects using standard toolchain (e.g.
>> binutils) can already reorder code and data pretty much arbitrary
>> using sections and linker scripts.
>> I think it's still attractive to have reordering in LLVM to be
>> independent from external toolchain. This will allow reordering in JIT
>> and other interesting things.
>>
>> I agree with John that special global with ordered list looks like the
>> clean approach. However, for the specific need in GHC I'm not sure
>> that this is enough.
>> What it's trying to do is placing a global variable (a struct) and a
>> function next to each other, so that it can use pointer arithmetic to
>> go from one address to another.
>> So, say, we take the address of the struct, add it's size and call
>> into resulting address. Sufficiently smart optimizer can spot that we
>> dereference a pointer pointing outside of the object. This probably
>> has undefined semantics and can be replaced with unreachable?
>> It's also a missed opportunity for optimizations -- if optimizer knew
>> where outside-of-the-struct pointer is really going it could make
>> direct call instead of indirect -- however, I don't know if this is a
>> big deal.
>
> If I understand, you want more than just ordering within a section,
> you want to override the section of a global to be in the text (or
> equivalent) section.  Is the global structure constant?  It seems a
> way to splat constants directly before/after/in a function and refer
> to them as a global would be useful for all manner of side-tables.
> Being able to just order output of globals and functions make picking
> sections for them fairly hackish.
>
> Andrew
>
>
>> Eugene
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Sebastian Redl
>> <sebastian.redl at getdesigned.at> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 11:42:41 +0100, David Terei <davidterei at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Hi All,
>>>>
>>>> The GHC developers would like to add support to llvm to enable the
>>>> order that code and data are laid out in, in the resulting assembly
>>>> code produced by llvm to be defined by the user. The reason we would
>>>> like to have this feature is explained in the blog post on GHC's use
>>>> of llvm here:
>>>> http://blog.llvm.org/2010/05/glasgow-haskell-compiler-and-llvm.html,
>>>> specifically under the title, 'Problems with backend'.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Whichever way is chosen, the ability to reorder and intermingle functions
>>> and data arbitrarily is interesting to more than just GHC. In particular, I
>>> would like to point out the efforts by Mozilla to make Firefox startup
>>> faster, which essentially came down to reordering stuff in the executables
>>> so that everything is ordered by the sequence of accesses during program
>>> startup. This means that programs can be read sequentially from the front
>>> to the end, thus reducing I/O latency.
>>>
>>> Tools for automating this process would probably benefit from being able
>>> to specify the layout this way.
>>>
>>> Sebastian
>>>
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>>
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>