Hello,
* Sent the patch to support targets
that their doloop part is not decoupled from the rest of the loop's
instructions (as is the case for ARM) to @gcc-patches:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-03/msg00350.html
* Continue looking into DENbench benchmarks.
Thanks,
Revital
Hi,
* continued working on cost model tuning. I don't see much difference
running EEMBC DenBench with and without vectorization enabled (and,
therefore, also with and without cost model).
Also, I have to say, that the results are not stable and I sometimes
get 10% difference just running the same executable two times in a
row.
* the only benchmark I see consistent degradation 5% with
vectorization is DenBench aes, both with GCC trunk and gcc-linaro 4.5.
I found one of the responsible loops, if it is not vectorized I see
only 1.8% degradation. The problem there is that the loop bound is
unknown at compile time, so the vectorizer attempts to vectorize the
loop using runtime guards to verify that there are enough iterations
to vectorize. The actual number of iterations is 4, so the scalar
version of the loop is chosen at the run time, but I guess the guards
cause the degradation. I'll continue looking into this next week.
* prepared the conditional-store-sink patch (one of the patches that
helps to vectorize Telecom Viterbi) for submission to gcc-patches.
Ira
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release
of Linaro QEMU 2011.03-1.
Linaro QEMU 2011.03-1 is the second release of qemu-linaro. Based
off upstream (trunk) qemu, it includes a number of ARM-focused
bug fixes and enhancements.
This release includes a model of the ARM Versatile Express
platform. This is still experimental but may be of use to people
who want a model supporting up to 1GB of RAM with graphics and
networking. Instructions for getting started with it are on the
wiki: https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuVersatileExpress
Other interesting changes include:
- The OMAP emulation bug which was causing hangs if Linux tried
to enable a swapfile is fixed
- The OMAP UART model has been improved; this fixes the problem where
kernels using the new omap-hsuart serial drivers stopped serial output
halfway through boot.
- As usual, various minor correctness fixes and other upstream changes
Known issues:
- The beagle and beaglexm models do not support USB, so there is no
keyboard, mouse or networking (#708703)
The only change over the shortlived 2011.03-0 is that the last
minute bug #731093 has been fixed (versatilepb models would crash
on startup.)
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+milestone/2011.03-1
Binary builds of this qemu-linaro release are being prepared and
will be available shortly for users of Ubuntu.
When ready, Natty packages of qemu-linaro 2011.03-1 will be in the
Ubuntu archive. Packages for users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu
10.10 will be in the linaro-maintainers tools ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/
More information on Linaro QEMU is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro
Hi all,
I've had comments that getting hold of binaries for the linaro
toolchain can be trick for people unfamiliar with the linaro tools.
One reason is that we don't release binaries as such -- but a visitor
browsing in through http://www.linaro.org/downloads/ won't discover
this, and may waste a lot of time trying to understand launchpad etc.
before coming to the conclusion that binaries either aren't available
or are not easily findable.
On the other hand, the cross toolchain packages are likely to be of
interest to such visitors, but aren't obviously advertised -- maybe
I'm looking in the wrong place, but if so then new visitors to the
linaro pages are likely to look in the wrong place too.
Would it make sense to explain the situation more prominently so that
visitors know what to expect?
Something along the lines of "if you use distro x revision y, these
cross-compiler packages are available" and "if you need the tools for
some other environment, you need to download the source and build it
for yourself".
Cheers
---Dave
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release
of Linaro GDB 7.2.
Linaro GDB 7.2 2011.03-0 is the fourth release in the 7.2 series.
Based off the latest GDB 7.2, it includes ARM-focused bug fixes and
enhancements.
Interesting changes include:
* Hardware watchpoint support
* Backtracing while in the Linux kernel trampoline frame
Hardware watchpoints use the support built into ARM devices to watch
for changes in values in memory with little performance impact. A
2.6.37 or later kernel is required.
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/+milestone/7.2-2011.03-0
More information on Linaro GDB is available at:
https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro
-- Michael
Committed Kazu's VFP testcases patch upstream.
Merged the latest from upstream GCC 4.6.
Merged all the outstanding launchpad merge requests against both GCC 4.5
and 4.6.
Spun the 4.5-2011.03-0 and 4.6-2011.03-0 releases. Passed the tarballs
to Michael H for final testing.
Brought the patch tracker up to date w.r.t. to new merges.
Posted one of Dan's patches upstream for review.
Decided to drop Julian's A8 alignment patch completely. I had previously
discovered it provided no measurable benefit on A8, and now I've found
the same for A9 (Pandaboard). There's no real improvement for any
combination of -falign-* options in EEMBC.
Bernd's "Discourage NEON on A8" patch also doesn't show any value in the
benchmark results, but I think I've forward ported it wrong, because it
should at least change the binary size, and it doesn't. I need to look
into this further.
I also decided I don't know enough about ARMv7, so I spent some time
reading a few chapters from the ARM A.R.M.
----
Upstream patched requiring review:
* Thumb2 constants:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-12/msg00652.html
* ARM EABI half-precision functions
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00874.html
* ARM Thumb2 Spill Likely tweak
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00880.html
* NEON scheduling patch
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg01431.html
* RVCT Interoperability patch
http://www.mail-archive.com/gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org/msg00059.html
Last week:
* Launchpad #711819 / PR47719: ARM minipool ICE. Followed up on
discussion with Bernd and Ramana. Later posted discussion results on
gcc-patches, where Richard Earnshaw took it over with a final fix.
* Coremark ARMv7/v6 regressions: mostly pinpointed the exact cases where
RTL simplification fails to optimize away ZERO_EXTEND expressions. Still
working on how to enhance it.
* TW Public Holiday on Feb.28 (Mon), was off for one day.
This week:
* Try to turn Coremark regression investigation into code form.
* Other GCC issues.
I've been spending this week playing around with various representations
of the v{ld,st}{1,2,3,4}{,_lane} operations. I agree with Ira that the
best representation would be to use built-in functions.
One concern in the original discussion was that the optimisers might
move the original MEM_REFs away from the call. I don't think that's
a problem though. For loads, we can simply treat the whole of the
accessed memory as an array, and pass the array by value. If we do that,
then the call would just look like:
__builtin_load_lanes (MEM_REF[(elem[N] *)ADDR])
(where, despite the C notation, the MEM_REF accesses the whole of elem[N]).
It is of course possible in principle for the tree optimisers to replace
this MEM_REF with another, equivalent, one, but that's OK semantically.
It isn't possible for the optimisers to replace it with something like
an SSA name, because arrays can't be stored in gimple registers.
__builtin_load_lanes would then be used like this:
combined_vectors = __builtin_load_lanes (...);
vector1 = ...extract first vector from combined_vectors...
vector2 = ...extract second vector from combined_vectors...
....
So combined_vectors only exists for load and extract operations.
The question then is: what type should it have? (At this point I'm
just talking about types, not modes.) The main possibilities seemed to be:
1. an integer type
Pros
* Gimple registers can store integers.
Cons
* As Julian points out, GCC doesn't really support integer types
that are wider than 2 HOST_WIDE_INTs. It would be good to
remove that restriction, but it might be a lot of work, and it
isn't something we'd want to take on as part of this project.
* We're not really using the type as an integer.
* The combination of the integer type and the __builtin_load_lanes
array argument wouldn't be enough to determine the correct
load operation. __builtin_load_lanes would need something
like a vector count (N => vldN) argument as well.
2. a combined vector type
Pros
* Gimple registers can store vectors.
Cons
* For vld3, this would mean creating vector types with non-power-
of-two vectors. GCC doesn't support those yet, and you get
ICEs as soon as you try to use them. (Remember that this is
all about types, not modes.)
It _might_ be interesting to implement this support, but as
above, it would be a lot of work. It also raises some semantic
questions, such as: what is the alignment of the new vectors?
Which leads to...
* The alignment of the type would be strange. E.g. suppose
we're loading N*2 uint32_ts into N vectors of 2 elements each.
The types and alignments would be:
N=2 uint32x4_t, alignment 16
N=3 uint32x6_t, alignment 8 (if we follow the convention for modes)
N=4 uint32x8_t, alignment 32
We don't need alignments greater than 8 in our intended use;
16 and 32 are overkill.
* We're not really using the type as a single vector,
but as a collection of vectors.
* The combination of the vector type and the __builtin_load_lanes
array argument wouldn't be enough to determine the correct
load operation. __builtin_load_lanes would need something
like a vector count (N => vldN) argument as well.
3. an array of vectors type
Pros
* No support for new GCC features (large integers or non-power-of-two
vectors) is needed.
* The alignment of the type would be taken from the alignment of the
individual vectors, which is correct.
* It accurately reflects how the loaded value is going to be used.
* The type uniquely identifies the correct load operation,
without need for additional arguments. (This is minor.)
Cons
* Gimple registers can't store array values.
So I think the only disadvantage of using an array of vectors is that the
result can never be a gimple register. But that isn't much of a disadvantage
really; the things we care about are the individual vectors, which can
of course be treated as gimple registers. I think our tracking of memory
values is good enough for combined_vectors to be treated as such
(even though, with the back-end changes we talked about earlier,
they will actually be stored in RTL registers).
So how about the following functions? (Forgive the pascally syntax.)
__builtin_load_lanes (REF : array N*M of X)
returns array N of vector M of X
maps to vldN
in practice, the result would be used in assignments of the form:
vectorX = ARRAY_REF <result, X>
__builtin_store_lanes (VECTORS : array N of vector M of X)
returns array N*M of X
maps to vstN
in practice, the argument would be populated by assignments of the form:
vectorX = ARRAY_REF <result, X>
__builtin_load_lane (REF : array N of X,
VECTORS : array N of vector M of X,
LANE : integer)
returns array N of vector M of X
maps to vldN_lane
__builtin_store_lane (VECTORS : array N of vector M of X,
LANE : integer)
returns array N of X
maps to vstN_lane
Note that each operation can be expanded independently. The expansion
doesn't rely on preceding or following statements.
I've hacked up the prototype below as a proof of concept. It includes
changes to the C parser to allow these functions to be created in the
original source code. This is throw-away code though; it would never
be submitted.
I've also included a simple test case and the output I get from it.
The output looks pretty good; there's not even the stray VMOV that
I saw with the intrinsics earlier in the week.
(Note that if you'd like to try this yourself, you'll need the patch
I posted on Monday as well.)
What do you think? Obviously this discussion needs to move to gcc@ at
some point, but I wanted to make sure this was vaguely sane first.
Richard
Hello,
I am looking for a way to disable '-gtoggle' flag in the run of stage 2 in
bootstrap; when
configuring ARM with (*).
The flag seems to be applied in stage 2 but not in stage 3 which seems to
cause bootstrap failure when
testing SMS as in stage 2 SMS fails because of debug_insn caused
by -gtoggle disturbing do-loop; while in stage 3 SMS succeeds; resulting
in different .o files and bootsrtrap failure.
(*) This the configure I used:
../gcc/configure --prefix=/home/eres/mainline/build --enable-checking
--enable-languages=c --enable-bootstrap
Thanks,
Revital
== GDB ==
* Committed fix for the GDB part of #620611 (Unable to
backtrace out of vector page 0xffff0000) to mainline and
Linaro GDB 7.2.
* Ran into GDB crashes due to memory corruption in tests
involving multiple inferiors. Tracked down root cause
(using valgrind) to long-standing double free bug in GDB
terminal state handling code. Committed fix to mainline
and Linaro GDB 7.2.
* While using valgrind (see above), ran into problems:
* ptrace system call is unsupported on ARM
* certain variants of the "SUB from SP" Thumb-2 instruction
are not handled by the VEX compiler
Fixed both problems locally, and was then able to successfully
valgrind GDB on ARM.
* Created Linaro GDB 7.2-2011.03-0 release.
* Worked on glibc patch to add ARM unwind tables to system
call stubs; this will help unwinding in the absence of
debug info for libc, and in particular fix #684218 (Failures
in gdb.base/call-signal-resume.exp)
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
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