Function pointers under PPC64 ELFv1 (which is used on PPC64/Linux on the
POWER7, A2 and earlier cores) are really pointers to a function descriptor, a
structure with three pointers: the actual pointer to the code to which to jump,
the pointer to the TOC needed by the callee, and an environment pointer. We
used to chain these loads, and make them opaque to the rest of the optimizer,
so that they'd always occur directly before the call. This is not necessary,
and in fact, highly suboptimal on embedded cores. Once the function pointer is
known, the loads can be performed ahead of time; in fact, they can be hoisted
out of loops.
Now these function descriptors are almost always generated by the linker, and
thus the contents of the descriptors are invariant. As a result, by default,
we'll mark the associated loads as invariant (allowing them to be hoisted out
of loops). I've added a target feature to turn this off, however, just in case
someone needs that option (constructing an on-stack descriptor, casting it to a
function pointer, and then calling it cannot be well-defined C/C++ code, but I
can imagine some JIT-compilation system doing so).
Consider this simple test:
$ cat call.c
typedef void (*fp)();
void bar(fp x) {
for (int i = 0; i < 1600000000; ++i)
x();
}
$ cat main.c
typedef void (*fp)();
void bar(fp x);
void foo() {}
int main() {
bar(foo);
}
On the PPC A2 (the BG/Q supercomputer), marking the function-descriptor loads
as invariant brings the execution time down to ~8 seconds from ~32 seconds with
the loads in the loop.
The difference on the POWER7 is smaller. Compiling with:
gcc -std=c99 -O3 -mcpu=native call.c main.c : ~6 seconds [this is 4.8.2]
clang -O3 -mcpu=native call.c main.c : ~5.3 seconds
clang -O3 -mcpu=native call.c main.c -mno-invariant-function-descriptors : ~4 seconds
(looks like we'd benefit from additional loop unrolling here, as a first
guess, because this is faster with the extra loads)
The -mno-invariant-function-descriptors will be added to Clang shortly.
llvm-svn: 226207
Looking at r225438 inspired me to see how the PowerPC backend handled the
situation (calling a bitcasted TLS global), and it turns out we also produced
an error (cannot select ...). What it means to "call" something that is not a
function is implementation and platform specific, but in the name of doing
something (besides crashing), this makes sure we do what GCC does (treat all
such calls as calls through a function pointer -- meaning that the pointer is
assumed, as is the convention on PPC, to point to a function descriptor
structure holding the actual code address along with the function's TOC pointer
and environment pointer). As GCC does, we now do the same for calling regular
(non-TLS) non-function globals too.
I'm not sure whether this is the most useful way to define the behavior, but at
least we won't be alone.
llvm-svn: 225617
Hal Finkel