[LLVMdev] Attaching range metadata to IntrinsicInst

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eli Bendersky" <eliben at google.com>
> To: "Nick Lewycky" <nicholas at mxc.ca>
> Cc: "LLVM Developers Mailing List" <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 8:41:58 AM
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Attaching range metadata to IntrinsicInst
>
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Nick Lewycky < nicholas at mxc.ca >
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Chandler Carruth wrote:
> 
> 
> This seems fine to me, but I'd like to make sure it looks OK to Nick
> as
> well.
> 
> I strongly prefer baking in knowledge about the intrinsics themselves
> into the passes if possible. Metadata will always be secondary.
> 
> 
> 
> So you're saying that in this particular case you'd prefer LLVM
> passes to know about the range of these PTX intrinsics, rather than
> Clang adding them as metadata?
> 
> ValueTracking.cpp already has some iffy target knowledge (someone
> sneaked a direct Intrinsic::x86_sse42_crc32_64_64 check in there),
> but extending it to other intrinsics in other targets seems like too
> much... So should target info be passed into it in some way? Any
> suggestions where to put it? TargetLibraryInfo? TargetTransformInfo?
> In any case this seems like the target interface will have to be
> augmented, and we'll have to carry an object around into
> ValueTracking's compute* functions. If this is the right way, then
> this is the way it will be done - design ideas are appreciated.

Personally, I'd love to see all of the target-specific intrinsics, and all associated optimization information, localized to each target backend. As it stands, however, the target intrinsics are part of the IR, and the IR optimizers contain the logic necessary to canonicalize that IR. Because ValueTracking is used during canonicalization (by InstCombine, etc.), I think that having it directly understand the intrinsics is fine -- just try not to make the code too messy ;)

 -Hal

> 
> 
> Eli
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Separately, should value tracking look use range metadata when it's
> available? Absolutely.
> 
> I think it should apply to all CallInst not just IntrinsicInst (which
> is derived from CallInst).
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:37 AM, Jingyue Wu < jingyue at google.com
> 
> 
> <mailto: jingyue at google.com >> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The range metadata can only be attached to LoadInst for now. I am
> considering extending its usage to IntrinsicInst so that the
> frontend can annotate the range of the return value of an intrinsic
> call. e.g.,
> %a = call i32 @llvm.xxx(), !range !0
> !0 = metadata !{ i32 0, i23 1024 }
> 
> The motivation behind this extension is some optimizations we are
> working on for CUDA programs. Some special registers in CUDA (e.g.,
> threadIdx.x) are bounded per CUDA programming guide, and knowing
> their ranges can improve the precision of ValueTracking and benefit
> optimizations such as InstCombine.
> 
> To implement this idea, we need ValueTracking to be aware of the
> ranges of these special variables. These special registers are so
> far read-only and accessed using intrinsics. e.g.,
> %threadIdx.x = call i32 @llvm.nvvm.read.ptx.sreg.tid. x().
> 
> One possible approach is to have ValueTracking compute the known
> bits of these intrinsics as special cases. This approach is already
> taken for the x86_sse42_crc32_64_64 intrinsic. However, this
> approach may not be elegant because the ranges of these CUDA special
> registers depend on the GPU compute capability specified by
> -target-cpu. For instance, blockIdx.x is bounded by 65535 in sm_20
> but 2^31-1 in sm_30. Exposing -target-cpu to ValueTracking is
> probably discouraged.
> 
> Therefore, the approach I am considering is to have clang annotate
> the ranges of these CUDA special registers according to the
> -target-cpu flag, and have ValueTracking pick the range metadata for
> optimization. By doing so, we hide the target-specific info from
> ValueTracking.
> 
> The code change in llvm minus clang won't be large. The core change
> is only a few lines:
> http://reviews.llvm.org/ differential/diff/10464/ . If this extension
> sounds good to you, I'll definitely add more tests and revise the
> documents on range metadata.
> 
> Best,
> Jingyue
> 
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory