[llvm-dev] RFC: Extending optimization reporting

Wed May 8 11:11:17 PDT 2019

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your input.

If I understand correctly, you’re saying that we can handle the loop versioning issue by explicitly identifying new loops as they are created. So, the unswitching optimization, for example, would report that it unswitched loop-0 at source location X, creating loop-1 and loop-2, and then later the vectorizer would report that it was unable to vectorize loop-1 at source location X, and later still that it was able to vectorize loop-2 at source location X. And at each stage the optimization pass emitting the remark would get the version information from loop metadata. Is that right?

If so, I think that is in basic agreement with what I wanted to do. I’ll need to talk about it with some of my co-workers who have been thinking about ways to solve this problem, but I like this direction.

As you say, unrolled loops are still a problem. There’s basically no place to reliably hang metadata so that we can report that an optimization is working with an unrolled portion of a loop.

I’m not sure about the inlining issue. At first glance it does sound as simple as you suggest. However, my colleagues who have done a lot of work with inlining tell me there are some complications that make recovering all of the necessary data to form a coherent description of what has happened difficult. They’ve explained it to me a couple of times, but I haven’t internalized the subtleties yet. I’ll have to get back to you about this part.

-Andy

From: anemet at apple.com <anemet at apple.com>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2019 2:27 PM
To: Kaylor, Andrew <andrew.kaylor at intel.com>
Cc: llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>; Francis Visoiu Mistrih <francisvm at apple.com>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] RFC: Extending optimization reporting

Hi Andrew,

On Apr 30, 2019, at 2:47 PM, Kaylor, Andrew via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:

I would like to begin a discussion about updating LLVM's opt-report infrastructure. There are some things I'd like to be able to do with optimization reports that I don't think can be done, or at least aren't natural to do, with the current implementation.

I understand that there is a lot of code in place already to produce optimization remarks, and one of my explicit goals is to minimize the amount of updating existing code while still enabling the new features I would like to support. I have some ideas in mind for how to achieve what I'm proposing, but I want to start out by just describing the desired results and if we can reach a consensus on these being nice things to have then we can move on to talking about the best way to get there.

I think the extensions I have in mind can broadly be organized into two categories: (1) ways to support different sorts of output, and

As you may have seen Francis’ recent work, we have some plans in this area as well.  Francis is going to cover that part ...

(2) ways to create connections between different events represented in the report.

… let me cover this part.

Near as I can tell, the only support we have in the code base is for YAML output. I think I could implement a new RemarkStreamer to get other formats, but nothing in the LLVM code base does that. Is that correct?

I'd like to be able to:
- Embed some subset of optimizations remarks as annotations in the generated assembly output
- Embed the remarks in the generated executable in a binary format consumed by the Intel Advisor tool
- Produce text output in a format recognized by Microsoft Visual Studio or other IDEs

The last of these is probably straightfoward since it's basically a streaming format such as the current infrastructure expects. The other two seem like they might be more complicated, since they involve keeping the information around, potentially across LTO, and correlated with the evolving IR until the final machine code or assembly is produced.

This leads me back to my second category of extensions, creating connections between different events in the opt report. My goal here is to be able to produce some kind of coherent report after compilation is complete that lets the user make some sense of how the IR evolved over the course of compilation and what effects that may have had on optimizations. This mostly has to do with the handling of loops, vectorization, and inlining.

Let's say, for example, I've got code like this:

for (...)
    A
    if (lic)
        B
    C

And the loop-unswitch pass turns it into this:

if (lic)
    for (...)
        A; B; C
else
    for (...)
        A; C

Now let's say the vectorizer for some reason is able to vectorize the loop in the else-clause but not the if-clause. (I don't know if this kind of thing is possible with the current phase ordering, but I think this theoretical example illustrates the idea anyway.)

I want some way to produce a report that tells the user about the existence of the two loops that were created when we unswitched the loop so that we can then tell the user in some sensible way that we couldn't vectorize one loop but that we could vectorize the second.

I'm not sure what the opt-viewer would currently do with a case like this, but what I want to avoid is getting stuck where the report we can emit essentially conveys the following not very helpful information.

for (...)
  // Loop was unswitched.
  // Loop could not be vectorized because...
  // Loop was vectorized.
    A
    if (lic)
        B
    C

Instead I'd like to have a way to produce something like this:

for (...)
  // Loop was unswitched for condition (srcloc)
  //   Unswitched loop version #1
  //     Unswitched for IF condition (srcloc)
  //     Loop was not vectorized:
  //   Unswitched loop version #2
  //     Loop was vectorized

The primary thing missing, I think, is a way for the vectorizer to give some indication of which version of the loop it is talking about in its optimization remarks and maybe a way for the opt-viewer to be able to make sense of that.

Likewise, there are things I want to be able to track with inlining. Let's say we go through the inlining pass pre-LTO and we make some decisions and report them. Then during LTO we go through another round of inlining and possibly make different decisions. I'd like to be able to either produce a report that shows just the inlining from the LTO pass or produce a report that shows a composite of all the inlining decisions that we made.

I think the general problem is that we’re currently missing the ability to distinguish between code versions generated for the same source code, i.e. as functions get inlined multiple times or as loops get versioned.  (There is also loop-unrolling where we duplicate iterations with potentially removing the loop altogether.)

I think that for the inlined case we can walk the inlinedAt metadata to identify the code version in question.  For loops we could attach a version number to the loop id.  Then as long as the versioning transformation properly declares the new version, subsequent transformations can refer to code version they modify.  Then on the client side we should have all the information to reconstruct what happened.

I see this as essentially extending the DebugLoc field with code version information in the remark.

This still wouldn’t handle unrolling which would require some new metadata but it would be a good start.

What do you think?

Adam

We tried something like this with an inlining report before (https://reviews.llvm.org/D19397), but it had the misfortune of being proposed at about the same time that the current opt-viewer mechanism was being developed and we didn’t manage to get aligned with that. I’m hoping that we can correct that now.
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