llvm-project/lld
Alexandre Ganea 8404aeb56a [Support] On Windows, ensure hardware_concurrency() extends to all CPU sockets and all NUMA groups
The goal of this patch is to maximize CPU utilization on multi-socket or high core count systems, so that parallel computations such as LLD/ThinLTO can use all hardware threads in the system. Before this patch, on Windows, a maximum of 64 hardware threads could be used at most, in some cases dispatched only on one CPU socket.

== Background ==
Windows doesn't have a flat cpu_set_t like Linux. Instead, it projects hardware CPUs (or NUMA nodes) to applications through a concept of "processor groups". A "processor" is the smallest unit of execution on a CPU, that is, an hyper-thread if SMT is active; a core otherwise. There's a limit of 32-bit processors on older 32-bit versions of Windows, which later was raised to 64-processors with 64-bit versions of Windows. This limit comes from the affinity mask, which historically is represented by the sizeof(void*). Consequently, the concept of "processor groups" was introduced for dealing with systems with more than 64 hyper-threads.

By default, the Windows OS assigns only one "processor group" to each starting application, in a round-robin manner. If the application wants to use more processors, it needs to programmatically enable it, by assigning threads to other "processor groups". This also means that affinity cannot cross "processor group" boundaries; one can only specify a "preferred" group on start-up, but the application is free to allocate more groups if it wants to.

This creates a peculiar situation, where newer CPUs like the AMD EPYC 7702P (64-cores, 128-hyperthreads) are projected by the OS as two (2) "processor groups". This means that by default, an application can only use half of the cores. This situation could only get worse in the years to come, as dies with more cores will appear on the market.

== The problem ==
The heavyweight_hardware_concurrency() API was introduced so that only *one hardware thread per core* was used. Once that API returns, that original intention is lost, only the number of threads is retained. Consider a situation, on Windows, where the system has 2 CPU sockets, 18 cores each, each core having 2 hyper-threads, for a total of 72 hyper-threads. Both heavyweight_hardware_concurrency() and hardware_concurrency() currently return 36, because on Windows they are simply wrappers over std:🧵:hardware_concurrency() -- which can only return processors from the current "processor group".

== The changes in this patch ==
To solve this situation, we capture (and retain) the initial intention until the point of usage, through a new ThreadPoolStrategy class. The number of threads to use is deferred as late as possible, until the moment where the std::threads are created (ThreadPool in the case of ThinLTO).

When using hardware_concurrency(), setting ThreadCount to 0 now means to use all the possible hardware CPU (SMT) threads. Providing a ThreadCount above to the maximum number of threads will have no effect, the maximum will be used instead.
The heavyweight_hardware_concurrency() is similar to hardware_concurrency(), except that only one thread per hardware *core* will be used.

When LLVM_ENABLE_THREADS is OFF, the threading APIs will always return 1, to ensure any caller loops will be exercised at least once.

Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D71775
2020-02-14 10:24:22 -05:00
..
COFF [lld] Replace SmallStr.str().str() with std::string conversion operator. 2020-01-29 21:30:21 -08:00
Common Make llvm::StringRef to std::string conversions explicit. 2020-01-28 23:25:25 +01:00
ELF [Support] On Windows, ensure hardware_concurrency() extends to all CPU sockets and all NUMA groups 2020-02-14 10:24:22 -05:00
MinGW [lld] Replace SmallStr.str().str() with std::string conversion operator. 2020-01-29 21:30:21 -08:00
cmake/modules
docs Bump the trunk major version to 11 2020-01-15 13:38:01 +01:00
include/lld Make llvm::StringRef to std::string conversions explicit. 2020-01-28 23:25:25 +01:00
lib Make llvm::StringRef to std::string conversions explicit. 2020-01-28 23:25:25 +01:00
test Revert "Revert "Reland "[Support] make report_fatal_error `abort` instead of `exit`""" 2020-02-13 10:16:06 -08:00
tools/lld Make it possible to redirect not only errs() but also outs() 2019-11-18 11:18:06 +09:00
unittests Make llvm::StringRef to std::string conversions explicit. 2020-01-28 23:25:25 +01:00
utils Python 2/3 compatibility 2019-03-20 07:42:13 +00:00
wasm [lld][WebAssembly] Fail if bitcode objects are pulled in after LTO 2020-02-11 17:36:15 -08:00
.arcconfig
.clang-format
.gitignore
CMakeLists.txt try to unbreak build after 4b6d9ac392 2020-01-16 10:12:35 -05:00
CODE_OWNERS.TXT
LICENSE.TXT Fix typos throughout the license files that somehow I and my reviewers 2019-01-21 09:52:34 +00:00
README.md

README.md

LLVM Linker (lld)

This directory and its subdirectories contain source code for the LLVM Linker, a modular cross platform linker which is built as part of the LLVM compiler infrastructure project.

lld is open source software. You may freely distribute it under the terms of the license agreement found in LICENSE.txt.

Benchmarking

In order to make sure various developers can evaluate patches over the same tests, we create a collection of self contained programs.

It is hosted at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/linker-tests/lld-speed-test.tar.xz

The current sha256 is 10eec685463d5a8bbf08d77f4ca96282161d396c65bd97dc99dbde644a31610f.