[LLVMdev] [llvm-commits] [PATCH] BasicBlock Autovectorization Pass

[Hal Finkel]

On Thu, 2011-12-29 at 15:00 +0100, Tobias Grosser wrote:
> On 12/14/2011 01:25 AM, Hal Finkel wrote:
> > Tobias,
> >
> > I've attached an updated copy of the patch. I believe that I accounted
> > for all of your suggestions except for:
> >
> > 1. You said that I could make AA a member of the class and initialize it
> > for each basic block. I suppose that I'd need to make it a pointer, but
> > more generally, what is the thread-safely model that I should have in
> > mind for the analysis passes (will multiple threads always use distinct
> > instances of the passes)? Furthermore, if I am going to make AA a class
> > variable that is re-initialized on every call to runOnBasicBlock, then I
> > should probably do the same with all of the top-level maps, etc. Do you
> > agree?
> 
> I am actually not sure about the thread safety conventions in LLVM. I 
> personally always assumed that a transformation class will only be 
> instantiated and used within a single thread and in case of multiple 
> threads, multiple class instances would be created.
> 
> The pattern of assigning analysis results to object variables is common 
> (e.g. lib/Analysis/IVUsers.cpp). So we should be able to use it.

Fair enough; I'll make the change.

> I 
> personally do not have any strong opinion about the other top-level 
> maps. Just decide yourself what is easier to read.
> 
> > 2. I have not (yet) changed the types of the maps from holding Value* to
> > Instruction*. Doing so would eliminate a few casts, but would cause
> > even-more casts (and maybe checks) in computePairsConnectedTo. Even so,
> > it might be worthwhile to make the change for clarity (conceptually,
> > those maps do hold only pointers to instructions).
> 
> I believe if code relies on the assumption that some data structures 
> only objects of a certain type, we should use that type to define the 
> data structures. Though, I do not think this change is required to 
> commit the patch. It can be addressed after the code was committed.

This makes sense, I'll probably change it prior to commit.

> 
> One thing that I would still like to have is a test case where 
> bb-vectorize-search-limit is needed to avoid exponential compile time 
> growth and another test case that is not optimized, if 
> bb-vectorize-search-limit is set to a value less than 4000. I think 
> those cases are very valuable to understand the performance behavior of 
> this code.

Good idea, I'll add these test cases.

> Especially, as I am not yet sure why we need a value as high 
> as 4000.

I am not exactly sure why that turned out to be the best number, but
I'll try this again in combination with my load/store reordering patch
and see if such a large value still seems best.

> 
> This is my last issue on this patch, that should be addressed before 
> committing it. After we discussed this, I propose to post a final patch 
> stating that you will commit after three days to give other people a 
> chance to veto.

Sounds like a good plan.

I had actually introduced some bugs during refactoring in the last patch
I had posted; I'm writing test cases for the fixes and then I'll post an
updated patch.

Thanks again,
Hal

> 
> Tobi

-- 
Hal Finkel
Postdoctoral Appointee
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory