[LLVMdev] GSoC 2011: Fast JIT Code Generation for x86-64

[Florian Brandner]

On Tue April 5 2011 23:49:21 Tilmann Scheller wrote:
> Hi Viktor,
> 
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv at wanadoo.es> wrote:
> 
> > Jim Grosbach <grosbach at apple.com> writes:
> >
> > >> To me, increasing coverage of the FastISel seemed more involved than
> > >> directly emitting opcodes to memory, with a lesser outlook on
> > >> reducing overhead.
> > >
> > > That seems extremely unlikely. You'd be effectively re-implementing
> > > both fast-isel and the MC binary emitter layers, and it sounds like a
> > > new register allocator as well.

it should be possible to leverage some of the existing infrastructure.
in particular, as Tilmann said, the MC binary emitter.

> > At some point on the past someone was kind enough to add fast-isel for
> > some instructions frequently emitted by my compiler, hoping that that
> > would speed up JITting. The results were dissapointing (negligible,
> > IIRC). Either fast-isel does not make much of a difference or the main
> > inefficiency is elsewhere.

going through machine-level IR is certainly one of those inefficiencies.
we should try to do code generation in two passes. one over the IR generating
binary code. the second fixing-up relocations on the binary code. instruction
selection and register allocation should be performed in one go.

everyone in the need for something more sophisticated can fall back to the 
regular backend flow.

>  fast-isel discussion aside, I think the real speed killer of a dynamic
> binary translator (or other users of the JIT which invoke it many times on
> small pieces of code) is the constant time of the JIT which is required for
> every source ISA BB (each BB gets mapped to an LLVM Function).
> 
> [1] cites a constant overhead of 10 ms per BB. I just did some simple
> measurements with callgrind doing an lli on a simple .ll file which only
> contains a main function which immediately returns. With -regalloc=fast and
> -fast-isel and an -O2 compiled lli we spend about 725000 instructions in
> getPointerToFunction(). Clearly, that's quite some constant overhead and I
> doubt that we can get it down by two orders of magnitude, so what about
> this:

i fully agree. i did some measurements (quite a while ago) and the backend
part was always dominating. even when rather heavy high-level optimizations 
were enabled.

in short, the JIT is not a JIT. it is merely a regular backend emitting 
instructions directly to memory.
(that's neat, but does not deliver the compile time people hope for)

> The old qemu JIT used an extremely simple and fast approach which performed
> surprisingly well: Having chunks of precompiled machine code (from C
> sources) for the individual IR instructions which at runtime get glued
> together and patched as necessary.
> 
> The idea would be to use the same approach to generate machine code from
> LLVM IR, e.g. having chunks of LLVM MC instructions for the individual LLVM
> IR instructions (ideally describing the mapping with TableGen), glueing them
> together doing no dynamic register allocation, no scheduling.

that is the way to go for me.

i just see one large obstacles: how do we handle lowering?
 
lowering is important to realize unsupported operations, ABI conventions, ...
most of this is now done in C++ code that is highly depending on the DAG. 

i would suggest to do lowering on the linear LLVM IR, that handles all relevant
constructs to be able to generate machine code directly from the IR. the DAG 
based lowering could be completely eliminated (or stripped down to a form of 
lowering/ABI/pre-isel optimization).

> I'd be willing to mentor such a project, let me know if you're interested.

i think this would be an important step to make the LLVM JIT more attractive.

bye,
Florian

-- 
Florian Brandner
Compilation and Embedded Computing Systems Group (COMPSYS)
Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon)
Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallelisme (LIP)
46 Allee d'Italie, F-69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France 

phone: +33 4 72 72 83 52
email : florian.brandner at ens-lyon.fr
web   : http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/florian.brandner/