[llvm-dev] RFC: LLVM Assembly format for ThinLTO Summary

Thu May 3 16:06:00 PDT 2018

On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 3:54 PM, Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Re-sending with trimmed quotation.
>
> On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 3:52 PM, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 3:29 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 3:08 PM Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev <
>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 2:44 PM, Mehdi AMINI <joker.eph at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Le mar. 1 mai 2018 à 16:50, Teresa Johnson <tejohnson at google.com> a
>>>>> écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Mehdi, thanks for the comments, responses and a tweaked proposal
>>>>>> below. Teresa
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 11:37 AM, Mehdi AMINI <joker.eph at gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> My main concern is this one:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> > Currently, I am emitting the summary entries at the end, after the
>>>>>>> metadata nodes. Note that the ModuleSummaryIndex is not currently
>>>>>>> referenced from the Module, and isn’t currently created when parsing the
>>>>>>> Module IR bitcode (there is a separate derived class for reading the
>>>>>>> ModuleSummaryIndex from bitcode). This is because they are not currently
>>>>>>> used at the same time. However, in the future there is no reason why we
>>>>>>> couldn’t tag the global values in the Module’s LLVM assembly with the
>>>>>>> corresponding summary entry if the ModuleSummaryIndex is available when
>>>>>>> printing the Module in the assembly writer. I.e. we could do the following
>>>>>>> for “main” from the above example when printing the IR definition (note the
>>>>>>> “^3” at the end):
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I believe the reason that the ModuleSummaryIndex is not attached to
>>>>>>> the Module is that it is fundamentally not a piece of IR, but it is
>>>>>>> conceptually really an Analysis result.
>>>>>>> Usually other analyses don't serialize their result, we happen to
>>>>>>> serialize this one for an optimization purpose (reloading it and making the
>>>>>>> thin-link faster).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> True. My understanding is that the push for having it serialized via
>>>>>> assembly is due to the fact that it is emitted into the bitcode. I know
>>>>>> there is disagreement on this reasoning, I am hoping to have a proposal
>>>>>> that is acceptable to everyone. =)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The fundamental problem is that an analysis result has to be able to
>>>>>>> be invalidated with IR changes, attaching this directly to the module
>>>>>>> wouldn't achieve this. The risk is that when the IR and the summary get
>>>>>>> out-of-sync (`clang -O2 my_module_with_summaries.ll -emit-llvm -o
>>>>>>> my_optimized module_with_summaries.ll`) the summaries would be badly wrong.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Have you looked into what it'd take to make it a "real" analysis in
>>>>>>> the pass manager?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks for raising this issue specifically, I hadn't addressed it in
>>>>>> my proposal and it is a big one. I am not proposing that we attempt to
>>>>>> maintain the summary through optimization passes, and definitely don't
>>>>>> think we should do that. IMO deserializing it should be for testing the
>>>>>> thin link and the combined summaries in the backends only. To that end, I
>>>>>> have an idea (below some background first).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Note that in some cases the module summary analysis is an analysis
>>>>>> pass. I.e. when invoked by "opt -module-summary=". However, some time ago
>>>>>> when Peter added the support for splitting the bitcode (for CFI purposes)
>>>>>> and therefore needed to generate a summary in each partition (Thin and
>>>>>> Regular), he added the ThinLTOBitcodeWriterPass, which invokes the module
>>>>>> summary builder directly (twice). This writer is what gets invoked now when
>>>>>> building via "clang -flto=thin", and with "opt -thinlto-bc". So there it is
>>>>>> not invoked/maintained as an analysis pass/result. It would be tricky to
>>>>>> figure out how to even split rather than recompute the module summary index
>>>>>> in that case. Even in the case where we are still invoking as an analysis
>>>>>> pass (opt -module-summary), we would need to figure out how to read in the
>>>>>> module summary to use as the analysis result when available (so that it
>>>>>> could be invalidated and recomputed when stale).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rather than add this plumbing, and just have it discarded if opt does
>>>>>> any optimization, I think we should focus at least for the time being on
>>>>>> supporting reading the summary from assembly exactly where we currently
>>>>>> read in the summary from bitcode:
>>>>>> 1) For the thin link (e.g. tools such as llvm-lto2 or llvm-lto, which
>>>>>> currently have to be preceded by "opt -module-summary/-thinlto-bc" to
>>>>>> generate an index, but could just build it from assembly instead).
>>>>>> 2) For the LTO backends (e.g. tools such as llvm-lto which can
>>>>>> consume a combined index and invoke the backends, or "clang
>>>>>> -fthinlto-index=" for distributed ThinLTO backend testing), where we could
>>>>>> build the combined summary index from assembly instead.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This greatly simplifies the reading side, as there are no
>>>>>> optimizations performed on the IR after the index is read in these cases
>>>>>> that would require invalidation. It also simplifies adding the parsing
>>>>>> support, since it gets invoked exactly where we expect to build an index
>>>>>> currently (i.e. since we don't currently build or store the
>>>>>> ModuleSummaryIndex when parsing the Module from bitcode). It doesn't
>>>>>> preclude someone from figuring out how to compute the module summary
>>>>>> analysis result from the assembly, and invalidating it after optimization,
>>>>>> when reading the Module IR via 'opt' in the future.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Does this seem like a reasonable proposal to everyone?
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Sounds good to me.
>>>>>
>>>>> That would make .ll files quite convenient during debugging I think?
>>>>> We could disassemble, manually change summaries, and re-assemble a bitcode
>>>>> file before running the (thin-)link again.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes, that seems more reasonable than what I thought you had in mind. If
>>>> the only consumer of this information is llvm-as, then the purpose of the
>>>> asm summary format is just to provide a way to create a .bc file for
>>>> testing purposes, which is certainly a useful capability.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That feels a bit surprising if ".ll -> llvm-as -> .bc -> <some other
>>> tool - opt, etc>" is different from ".ll -> <opt, etc>". Is that what we're
>>> talking about here? Any chance that can be avoided & feeding a .ll file
>>> works (in the sense of does the same thing/tests the same behavior) in all
>>> the same places that feeding a .bc file does? (as is the case with
>>> non-summary-based IR, to the best of my knowledge)
>>>
>>
> I may be mistaken, but I don't think we have a lot of tools that can read
> both .ll and .bc and end up using the summary if it is a .bc file. LTO
> can't read .ll, for example. The only one that I can think of is clang and
> presumably we could make that use whichever API we would use in llvm-as for
> reading the summary from .ll.
>

I was thinking it would be nice to enable tools like llvm-lto2 to take a
.ll file for reading the summary, or is that difficult?

So the behaviour of most tools would be that ".ll -> llvm-as -> .bc ->
> <some tool>" vs ".ll -> <some tool>" would end up being the same in both
> cases: the summary gets discarded.
>

I assume you are referring to tools that don't currently need the summary?
I.e. if <some tool> was llvm-lto2 we would not want the summary discarded.
But 'opt' would under the current proposal, as we don't normally read a
summary there and don't want to try to keep the summary in sync with the IR
for all the reasons mentioned in this thread.

Teresa

>
>
> Peter
>
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-- 
Teresa Johnson |  Software Engineer |  tejohnson at google.com |  408-460-2413
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