[llvm-dev] [RFC] bitfield access shrinking

Hal Finkel via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Thu Mar 9 15:52:49 PST 2017


On 03/09/2017 05:42 PM, Michael Kuperstein wrote:
> I think it'd be nice to keep CGP as "a grab-bag of relatively simple 
> transformations that don't require/preserve any complex analyses".
>
> Note that that's not quite where we're at right now - while CGP 
> doesn't seem to use AA at all, it does have *one* transformation that 
> uses LI and DT - eliminateMostlyEmptyBlocks. And it constructs those 
> on demand. :-\

:(

> We may want to split that out as well.
>
> (The "ModifiedDT" flag is a bit of red herring - IIUC, what it really 
> means is ModifiedCFG, I think the only place that uses it is the 
> optimizeBlock() iteration - and that probably ought to be using a 
> worklist instead...)

I certainly don't mind breaking things into separate passes so long as 
there aren't phase ordering problems. I'll point out, however, that:
  - If they're relatively-simple transformations, then updating the DT 
is probably not that hard (obviously I could have missed something, but 
I skimmed the code that this seems to be the case)
  - There are certainly things that are simple to do, but only if you 
have some proper analysis results. People tend to do hacky things to 
work around not having analysis results and that's not something we want 
to encourage.

Thus, I'd still vote for fixing CGP to preserve DT.

  -Hal

>
> On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Wei Mi <wmi at google.com 
> <mailto:wmi at google.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 10:54 AM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov
>     <mailto:hfinkel at anl.gov>> wrote:
>     > On 03/09/2017 12:14 PM, Wei Mi via llvm-dev wrote:
>     >>
>     >> In
>     >>
>     http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20120827/063200.html
>     <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20120827/063200.html>,
>     >> consecutive bitfields are wrapped as a group and represented as a
>     >> large integer and emits loads stores and bit operations appropriate
>     >> for extracting bits from within it. It fixes the problem of
>     violating
>     >> C++11 memory model that original widen load/store of bitfield was
>     >> facing. It also brings more coalescing opportunities across
>     bitfields.
>     >>
>     >> If some bitfields are natural aligned and their num of bits can
>     form a
>     >> legal integer type that the target supports, it is more
>     efficient to
>     >> access them directly than doing a large integer load/store plus a
>     >> series of bit operations. We call such reverse transformation legal
>     >> type bitfield shrinking. Currently, llvm depends on DAGCombiner
>     to do
>     >> such shrinking.
>     >>
>     >> However, DAGCombiner has the one-basic-block-a-time limitation,
>     so we
>     >> started to implement a new shrinking optimization in
>     >> https://reviews.llvm.org/D30416
>     <https://reviews.llvm.org/D30416>, and initially put it in
>     instcombine,
>     >> then moved it to CGP because we want to use some TargetLowering
>     >> information.
>     >>
>     >> The initial implementation in D30416 only supports
>     load-and-or-store
>     >> pattern matching, and it uses a inst-by-inst scan as a safety
>     check to
>     >> make sure there is no other memory write insn between the load and
>     >> store (no alias query is done).  After getting the initial
>     >> implementation, we found more problems: EarlyCSE, LoadPRE and even
>     >> InstCombine itself can do coalescing before the shrinking (LoadPRE
>     >> does it the most thoroughly).
>     >> The coalescing can move the load many BasicBlocks earlier and make
>     >> simple inst-by-inst scan unscalable and oftentimes fail. It also
>     >> breaks the load-and-or-store pattern. An example is below:
>     >>
>     >> Before coalescing done by earlycse/loadpre:
>     >> %bf.load = load i64, i64* %0, align 8
>     >> %bf.clear = and i64 %bf.load, -65536
>     >> %bf.set = or i64 %bf.value, %bf.clear
>     >> store i64 %bf.set2, i64* %9, align 8
>     >> .....
>     >> %bf.load1 = load i64, i64* %0, align 8
>     >> %bf.clear1 = and i64 %bf.load1, -4294901761
>     >> %bf.set1 = or i64 %bf.value1, %bf.clear1
>     >> store i64 %bf.set2, i64* %9, align 8
>     >> .....
>     >> %bf.load2 = load i64, i64* %0, align 8
>     >> %bf.clear2 = and i64 %bf.load2, -4294901761
>     >> %bf.set2 = or i64 %bf.value2, %bf.clear2
>     >> store i64 %bf.set2, i64* %9, align 8
>     >>
>     >> After coalescing, it will become:
>     >> %bf.load = load i64, i64* %0, align 8
>     >> %bf.clear = and i64 %bf.load, -65536
>     >> %bf.set = or i64 %bf.value, %bf.clear
>     >> .....
>     >> %bf.clear1 = and i64 %bf.set, -4294901761
>     >> %bf.set1 = or i64 %bf.value1, %bf.clear1
>     >> .....
>     >> %bf.clear2 = and i64 %bf.set1, -4294901761
>     >> %bf.set2 = or i64 %bf.value2, %bf.clear2
>     >> store i64 %bf.set2, i64* %9, align 8
>     >>
>     >> After load-store coalescing, %bf.load now is far away from the
>     store,
>     >> and the previous load-and-or-store pattern disappears.
>     >>
>     >> A simple idea to fix it is to move the shrinking in a very
>     early pass
>     >> before the first pass of EarlyCSE. However, if we move shrinking
>     >> earlier, it is possible to block the coalescing of other ilegal
>     type
>     >> bitfields which can not be shrinked. So for coalescing and
>     shrinking,
>     >> no matter which one is first, it will block the other one.
>     >>
>     >> After some discussions with Eli and Michael, I come up with another
>     >> idea to let shrinking stay in the late pipeline. It needs two
>     changes
>     >> to the current patch:
>     >>
>     >> 1. extending the pattern match to handle store(or(and(or(and...))
>     >> pattern above. It needs to analyze the bit mask of every and-or
>     pairs.
>     >> If the last and-or pair touch different section with the other
>     and-or
>     >> pairs, we can split the original store into two, and do the
>     shrinking
>     >> for the second store, like below
>     >>
>     >> %bf.load = load i64, i64* %0, align 8
>     >> %bf.clear = and i64 %bf.load, -65536
>     >> %bf.set = or i64 %bf.value, %bf.clear
>     >> .....
>     >>
>     >> %bf.clear1 = and i64 %bf.set, -4294901761
>     >> %bf.set1 = or i64 %bf.value1, %bf.clear1
>     >> store i64 %bf.set1, i64* %0, align 8              // the first
>     >> store.
>     >> .....
>     >>
>     >> %bf.value2.shrinked = shrink_op %bf.value2
>     >> store i16 %bf.value2.shrinked, i64* %0, align 8       //
>     shrinked store.
>     >>
>     >> 2. use memoryssa + alias query to do the safety check. Because
>     >> dominator tree is not properly updated in CGP, I have to create
>     a new
>     >> pass and put it before CGP, in order to use memoryssa.
>     >
>     >
>     > This makes sense to me. Should we just fix CGP to update the DT
>     instead of
>     > working around it?
>     >
>     >  -Hal
>
>     I am not familiar enough with CGP to tell. I just notice ModifiedDT is
>     modified at several places in CGP, which indicates there are a few
>     transformations needing their specific dominator tree maintainance
>     work. And I remember simplifyCFG also doesn't use dominator tree to
>     save the effort to maintain it on the fly. So maybe it is easier to
>     separate CGP into two parts: which does need dominator tree and
>     doesn't. Those transformations which don't need dominator tree can
>     stay together.
>
>     Currently, I know consthoisting is another potential CGP
>     transformation but left out because of its need of dominator tree. But
>     consthoisting has already evolved to contain a substantial amount of
>     code so may be better to stay as a separate pass.
>
>     Thanks,
>     Wei.
>
>     >
>     >>
>     >> Eli suggested me to ask for more opinions before start writting
>     code.
>     >> I think it is a good idea and here is the post. Comments are
>     >> appreciated.
>     >>
>     >> Thanks,
>     >> Wei.
>     >> _______________________________________________
>     >> LLVM Developers mailing list
>     >> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org <mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
>     >> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>     <http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev>
>     >
>     >
>     > --
>     > Hal Finkel
>     > Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
>     > Leadership Computing Facility
>     > Argonne National Laboratory
>     >
>
>

-- 
Hal Finkel
Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory

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