Initially, unranked memref descriptors in the LLVM dialect were designed only
to be passed into functions. An assertion was guarding against returning
unranked memrefs from functions in the standard-to-LLVM conversion. This is
insufficient for functions that wish to return an unranked memref such that the
caller does not know the rank in advance, and hence cannot allocate the
descriptor and pass it in as an argument.
Introduce a calling convention for returning unranked memref descriptors as
follows. An unranked memref descriptor always points to a ranked memref
descriptor stored on stack of the current function. When an unranked memref
descriptor is returned from a function, the ranked memref descriptor it points
to is copied to dynamically allocated memory, the ownership of which is
transferred to the caller. The caller is responsible for deallocating the
dynamically allocated memory and for copying the pointed-to ranked memref
descriptor onto its stack.
Provide default lowerings for std.return, std.call and std.indirect_call that
maintain the conversion defined above.
This convention is additionally exercised by a runtime test to guard against
memory errors.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D82647
C interface emission is controlled by a flag and has coarse granularity.
With this coarse control, interfaces are emitted for all external functions.
This makes is easy to get undefined symbols.
This revision adds support for controlling per-function emission with an "emit_c_interface" attribute.
The existing (default) calling convention for memrefs in standard-to-LLVM
conversion was motivated by interfacing with LLVM IR produced from C sources.
In particular, it passes a pointer to the memref descriptor structure when
calling the function. Therefore, the descriptor is allocated on stack before
the call. This convention leads to several problems. PR44644 indicates a
problem with stack exhaustion when calling functions with memref-typed
arguments in a loop. Allocating outside of the loop may lead to concurrent
access problems in case the loop is parallel. When targeting GPUs, the contents
of the stack-allocated memory for the descriptor (passed by pointer) needs to
be explicitly copied to the device. Using an aggregate type makes it impossible
to attach pointer-specific argument attributes pertaining to alignment and
aliasing in the LLVM dialect.
Change the default calling convention for memrefs in standard-to-LLVM
conversion to transform a memref into a list of arguments, each of primitive
type, that are comprised in the memref descriptor. This avoids stack allocation
for ranked memrefs (and thus stack exhaustion and potential concurrent access
problems) and simplifies the device function invocation on GPUs.
Provide an option in the standard-to-LLVM conversion to generate auxiliary
wrapper function with the same interface as the previous calling convention,
compatible with LLVM IR porduced from C sources. These auxiliary functions
pack the individual values into a descriptor structure or unpack it. They also
handle descriptor stack allocation if necessary, serving as an allocation
scope: the memory reserved by `alloca` will be freed on exiting the auxiliary
function.
The effect of this change on MLIR-generated only LLVM IR is minimal. When
interfacing MLIR-generated LLVM IR with C-generated LLVM IR, the integration
only needs to require auxiliary functions and change the function name to call
the wrapper function instead of the original function.
This also opens the door to forwarding aliasing and alignment information from
memrefs to LLVM IR pointers in the standrd-to-LLVM conversion.
Alex Zinenko