[llvm-dev] Supporting LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB on Windows

Tue Sep 14 13:44:46 PDT 2021

> On Sep 14, 2021, at 3:10 PM, Saleem Abdulrasool <compnerd at compnerd.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2021 at 11:44 AM Chris Bieneman <chris.bieneman at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> I had a thought and two questions related to this.
>> 
>> The thought:
>> 
>> We informally have three types of APIs in LLVM components. We have stable-ish C APIs, unstable C++ APIs that are expected to be used outside the component and unstable C++ APIs that are internal to the component.
>> 
>> In some (but not all) cases we make a technical distinction between internal to the component APIs by putting the headers for those APIs in the lib folder beside the implementation.
>> 
>> If we’re talking about annotating APIs for symbol export control (which I’m 100% in favor of), should we also consider a more formal designation for library-internal APIs.
>> 
>> One thought I had was should we adopt a policy where all APIs in the `llvm` namespace are required to be annotated for export, but APIs in the `llvm::internal` namespace are not?
> 
> I think that this is likely far more heavy handed, but would absolutely help to automate.  I think that if we adopt this and extend clang’s compilation database, the attributes could be added as a post commit hook.
> 
> That said, I’m not sure that predicating the improvement for windows in such a large change to llvm policy is something that’s entirely reasonable.  I think that this happening over time and revisiting the implantation subsequently is fine though.

Fair enough.

> 
>> 
>> And the open questions:
>> 
>> (1) Are there changes to the MSVC or Clang-CL toolchains that we could push for/make ourselves that would make this easier to maintain?
> 
> Some changes that clang could do to help with this is to introduce the linker invocations into compile_commands.json.  Additionally, we would need the module name for the output at compile time.

That would be a very interesting enhancement.

> 
>> (2) Can we implement a clang-tidy check for however we want this to be done, and enable it as part of the LLVM clang-tidy configuration? (Surely the technical answer here is yes, it is just some amount of work)
> 
> I don’t think that there’s a good way to do this in reality.  The problem is that you do not have an automated way to determine what is public and what is not.  That said, I do have https://github.com/compnerd/ids to at least help with the annotation.  It’s not complete and still would require some further refinement.

I actually disagree here. We do have an automated way to determine what is currently public and what is not, although we may have an overly broad definition of public. Today, any symbol declared under the `include` directory for a project is public. Whether or not it _should_ be public is a different issue. We currently treat all of those symbols as public exports from component libraries.

-Chris

> 
>> 
>> -Chris
>> 
>>> On Sep 9, 2021, at 5:15 PM, Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 11:51 AM Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 9:38 AM Saleem Abdulrasool <compnerd at compnerd.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 7:09 PM Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Hi Saleem,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I am concerned that your change will increase the maintenance burden for those of us who would prefer to develop without shared libraries. Since it is unclear a priori where the macros will be required, developers will need to build both with and without shared libraries in order to verify that they aren't breaking the build for shared library users -- in effect slowing down the development for folks who prefer to develop without shared libraries.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Failure to annotate the API wouldn’t break the build, it would mean that the API is not available.  Of there are no users of the API outside of the module, everything would continue to work.  It is if there are users of the API outside of the module that it matters.  However, that implicitly tells you what needs to be annotated apriori.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It will break the build if I add code to a tool that calls an API that isn't exported. Because of inlining etc it may not be obvious that a particular API needs to be exported. Hence the need for two builds to check for these problems.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I think your goal should be achievable without littering the code with macros.
>>>>> 
>>>>> In order to support that, we would need a secondary source of truth: a text file with the decorated names of any exported function.  Such a model IMO is far worse.  The name decoration scheme is not universal, and not in llvm’s control (Microsoft’s scheme is owned by Microsoft and is subject to change).  But yes, theoretically, an secondary source of truth could achieve this.
>>>> 
>>>> This was not my proposal. The only exports would be:
>>>> 
>>>> <tool name 1>_main
>>>> <tool name 2>_main
>>>> <tool name 3>_main
>>>> etc.
>>>> 
>>>> And that can be very easily managed simply by exporting the *_main functions, e.g. via dllexport.
>>>>  
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Perhaps on Windows you can achieve your goal with a variant of Leonard Chan's "busybox" proposal [1] with some adjustments to account for a lack of symlink support on Windows. Perhaps something like:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I’d like to be able to link this into server processes and tools with potential for dynamic loading.
>>>> 
>>>> That seems a little too open ended, and at least has a higher cost/benefit ratio than just solving the problem of 2GiB of bloat from tools, which can be solved in a much less intrusive way than the export macros.
>>>>  
>>>>>   Additionally, this would make execution of the tools significantly more expensive (which is also why I’m interested in a dual library approach).
>>>> 
>>>> As long as the only exports are the *_main functions, the code in the .dll would be basically the same as in the .exe, so I don't see how it would be more expensive.
>>>> 
>>>>> If I’m mistaken about the multicall binary approach, perhaps we should be looking at removing the library options and replacing them with the multicall binary?
>>>> 
>>>> Naively making it a multicall binary on Windows would hit the problem of lack of reliable symlink support, hence the proposal to make the tools stub .exes that just call into a .dll.
>>> 
>>> I discussed this with Saleem offline. Although I still think there is scope for exploring alternative approaches as described above, it seems neither of us are willing/have time to pursue it, so I won't stand in the way here.
>>> 
>>> My concern remains that the rules for updating the annotations may be non-obvious at times. If the burden for updating the annotations were placed on those who care about the shared library builds, that may make things easier for day-to-day development. Perhaps one way to do that would be for the annotations to be considered "peripheral tier" in terms of our support policy, so that they aren't tracked by normal CI and only those who care about the shared library build are responsible for updating them.
>>> 
>>> Peter
>>>> 
>>>> Peter
>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - Create a <tool name>_main() entry point for each tool that does not use llvm::cl to parse options.
>>>>>> - Create a llvm.dll in the bin directory that links together all the <tool name>_main() entry points.
>>>>>> - Each tool <tool name>.exe consists of:
>>>>>> int main() {
>>>>>>   <tool name>_main();
>>>>>> }
>>>>>> - Tools that use llvm::cl will need to be linked with all of their code in the .exe for now. However, they can be incrementally switched away from llvm::cl and moved into llvm.dll.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Peter
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-June/151321.html
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 3:52 PM Saleem Abdulrasool via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hello llvm-dev,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> One of the current limitations on LLVM on Windows is that you cannot use LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/tools/llvm-shlib/CMakeLists.txt#L14-L16  I am interested in trying to see if we can lift this limitation.  There are others in the community that also seem to be interested in seeing LLVM being possible to use as a DLL on Windows and the topic does come up on the mailing lists every so often.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> When you build a distribution of a LLVM based toolchain currently, the result on Windows is ~2GiB for a trimmed down toolset.  This is largely due to the static linking used for all the tools.  I would like to be able to use the shared LLVM build for building a toolset on Windows.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Unlike Unix platforms, the default on Windows is that all symbols are treated as `dso_local` (that is `-fvisibility-default=hidden`).  Symbols which are meant to participate in dynamic linking are to be attributed as `__declspec(dllexport)` in the module and `__declspec(dllimport)` external to the module.  This is similar to Unix platforms where `__attribute__((__visibility__(...)))` controls the same type of behaviour with `-fvisibility-default=hidden`.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> For the case of distributions, it would remain valuable to minimize the number of shared objects to reduce the files that require to be shipped but also to minimize the number of cross-module calls which are not entirely free (i.e. PLT+GOT or IAT costs).  At the same time, the number of possible labels which can be exposed from a single module on Windows is limited to 64K.  Experience from MSys2 indicates that LLVM with all the backends is likely to exceed this count (with a subset of targets, the number already is close to 60K).  This means that it may be that we would need two libraries on Windows.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> With the LLVM community being diverse, people often build on different platforms with different configurations, and I am concerned that adding more differences in how we build libraries complicates how maintainable LLVM is.  I would suggest that we actually change the behavior of the Unix builds to match that of Windows by building with `-fvisibility-default=hidden`.  Although this is a change, it is not without value.  By explicitly marking the interfaces which are vended by a library and making everything else internal, it does enable some potential optimization options for the compiler and linker (to be clear, I am not suggesting that this will have a guaranteed benefit, just that it can potentially enable additional opportunities for optimizations and size reductions).  This should incidentally help static linking.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> In order to achieve this, we would need to have a module specific annotation to indicate what symbols are meant to be used outside of the module when built in a shared configuration.  The same annotation would apply to all targets and is expected to be applied uniformly.  This of course has a cost associated with it: the public interfaces would need to be decorated appropriately.  However, by having the same behaviour on all the platforms, developers would not be impacted by the platform differences in their day-to-day development.  The only time that developers would need to be aware of this is when they are working on the module boundary, that is, changes which do not change the API surface of LLVM would not need to consider the annotations.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Concretely, what I believe is required to enable building with LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB on Windows is:
>>>>>>> - introduce module specific decoration (e.g. LLVM_SUPPORT_ABI, ...) to mark public interfaces of shared library modules
>>>>>>> - decorate all the public interfaces of the shared library modules with the new decoration
>>>>>>> - switching the builds to use `-fvisibility-default=hidden` by default
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I believe that these can be done mostly independently and staged in the order specified.  Until the last phase, it would have no actual impact on the builds.  However, by staging it, we could allow others to experiment with the option while it is under development, and allows for an easier path for switching the builds over.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Although this would enable LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB on Windows, give us better uniformity between Windows and non-Windows platforms, potentially enable additional optimization benefits, improve binary sizes for a distribution of the toolchain (though less on Linux where distributors are already using the build configuration ignoring the official suggestions in the LLVM guides), and help with runtime costs of the toolchain (by making the core of the tools a shared library, the backing pages can now be shared across multiple instances), it is not entirely without downsides.  The primary downsides that I see are:
>>>>>>> - it becomes less enticing to support both LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB and BUILD_SHARED_LIBS: while technically possible, interfaces will need to be decorated for both forms of the build
>>>>>>> - LLVM_DYLIB_COMPONENTS becomes less tractable: in theory it is possible to apply enough CPP magic to determine where a symbol is homed, but allowing a symbol to be homed in a shared or static library is significantly more complex
>>>>>>> - BUILD_SHARED_LIBS becomes more expensive to maintain: the decoration is per-module, which requires that we would need to decorate the symbols of each module with module specific annotations as well
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> One argument that people make for BUILD_SHARED_LIBS is that it reduces the overall time build-test cycle.  With the combination of lld, DWARF Fission, and LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB, I believe that most of the benefits still can be had.  The cost of linking all the tools is amortized across the link of a single library, which while not as small as the a singular library, is offset by the following:
>>>>>>> - The LLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB would not require the re-linking of all the libraries for each tool.
>>>>>>> - DWARF Fission would avoid the need to relink all of the DWARF information.
>>>>>>> - lld is faster than the gold and bfd linkers
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Header changes would still ripple through the system as before, requiring rebuilding the transitive closure.  Source file changes do not have the same impact of course.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> For those would like a more concrete example of what a change like this may shape up into: https://reviews.llvm.org/D109192 contains `LLVMSupportExports.h` which has the expected structure for declaring the decoration macros with the rest of the change primarily being focused on applying the decoration.  Please ignore the CMake changes as they are there to ensure that the CI validates this without changing the configuration and not intended to be part of the final version of the change.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>>> Saleem Abdulrasool
>>>>>>> compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> LLVM Developers mailing list
>>>>>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>>>>>>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>> Peter
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Saleem Abdulrasool
>>>>> compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> -- 
>>>> Peter
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> -- 
>>> Peter
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> LLVM Developers mailing list
>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>> 
> -- 
> Saleem Abdulrasool
> compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
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