[llvm-dev] Scalable Vector Types in IR - Next Steps?

[Graham Hunter via llvm-dev]

Hi Renato,

> It goes without saying that those discussions should have been had in
> the mailing list, not behind closed doors.

I have encouraged people to respond on the list or the RFC many times,
but I've not had much luck in getting people to post even if they
approve of the idea.

> Agreeing to implementations
> in private is asking to get bad reviews in public, as the SVE process
> has shown *over and over again*.

There isn't an agreement on the implementation yet; I have posted two
possibilities and am trying to get consensus on an approach from the
community.

>> The basic argument was that they didn't believe the value gained from enabling VLA autovectorization was worth the added complexity in maintaining the codebase. They were open to changing their minds if we could demonstrate sufficient demand for the feature.
> 
> In that case, the current patches to change the IR should be
> abandoned, as well as reverting the previous change to the types, so
> that we don't carry any unnecessary code forward.

There's no consensus on supporting the opaque types either yet. Even
if we do end up going down that route, it could be modified -- as I
mentioned in my notes, I could introduce a single toplevel type to
the IR if I stored additional data in it (making it effectively the
same as the current VectorType, just opaque to existing optimization
passes), and then would be able to lower directly to the existing
scalable MVTs we have.


> The review you sent seems to be a mechanical change to include the
> intrinsics, but the target lowering change seems to be too small to
> actually be able to lower anything.

The new patches are just meant to demonstrate the basics of the opaque
type to see if there's greater consensus in exploring this approach
instead of the VLA approach.

> Without context, it's hard to know what's going on.

The current state is just what you stated in your initial email in this
chain; we have a solution that seems to work (in principal) for SVE, RVV,
and SX-Aurora, but not enough people that care about VLA vectorization
beyond those groups.

Given the time constraints, Arm is being pushed to consider a plan B to
get something working in time for early 2020.

-Graham