[LLVMdev] Proposal: Loads/stores with deterministic trap/unwind behavior

[Philip Reames]

Speaking as someone working on another language where the performance of 
null checks are a major concern, I find myself agreeing with Andy and 
Filip here.

I'm somewhat okay with the addition of the "nullcheck" attribute. I'm 
not convinced it's really necessary, but the burden seems low. I find 
myself in strong opposition to the new load/store variants. As others 
have pointed out, there's not a clear win here and there's a *serious* 
cost to modifying the IR - both current and ongoing.

Worth noting, both of your load and store instructions could be 
implemented as intrinsics with minimal (if any) loss in expressiveness 
or performance.  There are function attributes which express nearly all 
the aliasing properties you'd need.  The only real complication is that 
we don't really support invoking intrinsics today.  I've got some hacky 
changes out of tree that address that issue, but it needs to be 
discussed on the mailing list before sharing.

Just to note: I'm not taking a position w.r.t. the profitability of 
implicit null checks as a whole.  We plan on running this experiment at 
some point, but it's fairly low priority for us.  There's definitely 
more profitable things to get to first.

IMHO, a better area to invest in would be in null check elimination.  
We've found a couple of cases where "obviously" redundant null checks 
get missed by the optimizer.  We haven't started digging into this in 
great detail, but that seems like it would be a much more profitable 
optimization opportunity.

Philip


On 04/07/2014 01:07 AM, Andrew Trick wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2014, at 8:52 PM, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 12:21:17AM -0700, Andrew Trick wrote:
>>> On Mar 31, 2014, at 6:58 PM, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I wanted to propose an IR extension that would allow us to support zero-cost
>>>> exception handling for non-call operations that may trap. I wanted to start
>>>> with loads and stores through a null pointer, and later we might extend this to
>>>> div/rem/mod zero. This feature is obviously useful for implementing languages
>>>> such as Java and Go which deterministically translate such operations into
>>>> exceptions which may be caught by the user.
>>>>
>>>> There are a couple of somewhat orthogonal features that this would entail:
>>>>
>>>> 1) Deterministic handling for loads and stores through a null pointer.
>>>> 2) Ability to unwind a load/store to a specific basic block, like invoke.
>>>>
>>>> At the moment, we do not exactly have 1), as the optimizer considers
>>>> non-volatile loads/stores through a null pointer to have undefined
>>>> behavior. Volatile loads/stores are closer, but they come with their own
>>>> set of baggage that can inhibit optimization. (For example, if we can prove
>>>> that a load would always succeed, 'volatile' prevents us from reordering
>>>> the load or deleting it if it is dead.) So I propose to add an attribute to
>>>> 'load' and 'store', which we can call, say, 'nullcheck', with the following
>>>> additional semantics:
>>>>
>>>> - If the memory address is between zero and a target-defined value (i.e. the
>>>>   size of the zero page) the instruction is guaranteed to trap in a
>>>>   target-defined manner.
>>>>
>>>> - The optimizer may only delete or reorder nullcheck instructions if the
>>>>   program cannot observe such a transformation by installing a signal handler
>>>>   for the trap.  Therefore, the optimizer would be able to drop the attribute
>>>>   if it can prove that the address will always be non-null.
>>>>
>>>> To support 2), I propose a couple of new instructions. I haven't come up with
>>>> great names for these instructions, but:
>>>>
>>>> - 'iload' is to 'load' as 'invoke' is to 'call'. That is, the instruction is
>>>>   a terminator and has normal and unwind destinations. e.g.
>>>>
>>>>   %v = iload i8* %ptr to label %try.cont unwind label %lpad
>>>>
>>>> - Similarly, 'istore' is to 'store' as 'invoke' is to 'call'.
>>>>
>>>>   istore i8 %v, i8* %ptr to label %try.cont unwind label %lpad
>>>>
>>>> These instructions always have 'nullcheck' semantics, plus:
>>>>
>>>> - If the instruction traps and the program has installed a signal handler
>>>>   for the trap which unwinds, the unwind is guaranteed to land at the
>>>>   landing pad.
>>>>
>>>> I've been working on an implementation of 'iload' and 'istore' which are
>>>> in the attached patches, if you are interested. (They aren't ready to go
>>>> in yet.) I have asm parsing/printing for both, and code generation for
>>>> 'iload'. Would be interested in getting feedback on code generation as this
>>>> is my first serious foray into the backend -- I haven't tried running the
>>>> generated code yet and the DAG builder is a mashup of the DAG builders for
>>>> 'invoke' and 'load', but I've eyeballed the asm it generates (e.g. llc produces
>>>> iload-exception.s for the attached iload-exception.ll) and it looks reasonable.
>>> Hi Peter. All due respect, I don’t think it’s right to introduce new load/store instructions with equivalent semantics to and+icmp+br+load/store.
>> I don't think the new instructions have equivalent semantics. If the null check
>> fails with the iload/istore instructions, we need to throw the appropriate
>> language-specific exception and evaluate it against the landing pad. There
>> may also need to be an active exception that can be resumed.
>>
>> As far as I can tell, the frontend would need to emit IR that calls the
>> language runtime to manually throw the exception. This IR would need to be
>> recognized by the IR optimization that converts the icmp+br+load/store to
>> a checked load/store. It seems to me that it would be simpler to just start
>> with the checked load/store.
> I agree with Filip that implementing null checks as trapping loads is essentially a minor code-size optimization that is typically not worthwhile. However, my point is that this decision should not be made at IR level.
>
> It could make sense to have a null check intrinsic that encapsulates and+cmp+br+invoke. I just don't like the idea of it subsuming the load/store. I think that will complicate both null check optimization and load/store optimization.
>
> Whether the null check can be profitably implemented as a trapping load/store is specific to the target platform. This decision should be independent of optimization in the presence of null checks and independent of optimization of the null checks themselves. It is purely a codegen issue.
>
> Imagine someone else porting your frontend to a new platform. They should not be required to implement trapping loads/stores to achieve a working system. And either way, they should benefit from the same platform independent optimization.
>
>>> ‘invoke’ is different. It is needed because there is no way for the caller to explicitly check for an exception.
>>>
>>> We do introduce intrinsics that encapsulate things like overflow checks. This is done to eliminate control flow edges that tend to inhibit LLVM’s optimizer and instruction selection. But you’re not removing the control flow, so this technique does not apply. Null checks should actually be exposed in IR so general optimizations can remove redundant checks.
>> My idea for removing redundant checks is to teach the IR optimizer to
>> treat iloads/istores as if they were null checks. Is there any reason
>> why this wouldn't work?
> I think it would be poor IR design. The optimizer should be able to assume loads are loads and stores are stores. People writing optimization passes will not remember that there is now another special load/store operation they should consider.
>
> An intrinsic makes it fairly clear that optimization passes will typically ignore this operation. Ideally, language-specific intrinsics are lowered early into canonical IR and platform-specific intrinsics are generated late from canonical IR to avoid complicating optimization.
>
>>> Ideally this would just be a machine code pass that can hoist a load/store above a branch and nuke the compare. However, I can see how it’s easier to relate the compare operand to the address arithmetic at IR level.
>>>
>>> To do this at IR level, you could introduce a pre-CodeGen pass that converts cmp+br+load/store into a checked load intrinsic. Since this intrinsic only exists for instruction selection, the optimizer doesn’t need to know about it.
>> I did initially consider implementing the checked load/store as an
>> intrinsic. But there are relatively boring reasons why this won't work at
>> present. For example, there is no current way to represent a struct load
>> using an intrinsic, as there is no mangling for struct types. Also, named
>> structs would need a mangling that is resistant to renames. Rather than
>> solve these problems, I decided to avoid intrinsics entirely.
> Ok. This seems worth solving. Maybe it should be discussed in another thread.
>
>>> The intrinsic would need to be lowered to an MI pseudo-instruction that feels like a load/store to the backend, but is a terminator. During code emission you could grab the address of that pseudo load/store and its resulting branch target to inform the runtime.
>> As far as I know, a load can lower to multiple machine instructions. This
>> will definitely be the case for the Go frontend that I'm working with, as
>> its IR tends to use struct loads/stores quite frequently. So I'm not sure
>> if this will work. I think it needs to look a lot like how the lowering for
>> invokes currently looks, with a pair of EH_LABELs around a set of ordinary
>> load/store MIs -- which is how I implemented it.
> That sounds nice. But I'm not sure that's sufficient to prevent the MI level loads being optimized away or move/combined when you still need the null check in the original position.
>
> -Andy
>
>> Thanks,
>> -- 
>> Peter
>
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