Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/5] arch: atomic rework

[Peter Sewell]

On 18 February 2014 20:43, Torvald Riegel <triegel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-02-18 at 12:12 +0000, Peter Sewell wrote:
>> Several of you have said that the standard and compiler should not
>> permit speculative writes of atomics, or (effectively) that the
>> compiler should preserve dependencies.  In simple examples it's easy
>> to see what that means, but in general it's not so clear what the
>> language should guarantee, because dependencies may go via non-atomic
>> code in other compilation units, and we have to consider the extent to
>> which it's desirable to limit optimisation there.
>
> [...]
>
>> 2) otherwise, the language definition should prohibit it but the
>>    compiler would have to preserve dependencies even in compilation
>>    units that have no mention of atomics.  It's unclear what the
>>    (runtime and compiler development) cost of that would be in
>>    practice - perhaps Torvald could comment?
>
> If I'm reading the standard correctly, it requires that data
> dependencies are preserved through loads and stores, including nonatomic
> ones.  That sounds convenient because it allows programmers to use
> temporary storage.

The standard only needs this for consume chains, but if one wanted to
get rid of thin-air values by requiring implementations to respect all
(reads-from union dependency) cycles, AFAICS we'd need it pretty much
everywhere.   I don't myself think that's likely to be a realistic
proposal, but it does keep coming up, and it'd be very interesting to
know the actual cost on some credible workload.

> However, what happens if a dependency "arrives" at a store for which the
> alias set isn't completely known?  Then we either have to add a barrier
> to enforce the ordering at this point, or we have to assume that all
> other potentially aliasing memory locations would also have to start
> carrying dependencies (which might be in other functions in other
> compilation units).  Neither option is good.  The first might introduce
> barriers in places in which they might not be required (or the
> programmer has to use kill_dependency() quite often to avoid all these).
> The second is bad because points-to analysis is hard, so in practice the
> points-to set will not be precisely known for a lot of pointers.  So
> this might not just creep into other functions via calls of
> [[carries_dependency]] functions, but also through normal loads and
> stores, likely prohibiting many optimizations.
>
> Furthermore, the dependency tracking can currently only be
> "disabled/enabled" on a function granularity (via
> [[carries_dependency]]).  Thus, if we have big functions, then
> dependency tracking may slow down a lot of code in the big function.  If
> we have small functions, there's a lot of attributes to be added.
>
> If a function may only carry a dependency but doesn't necessarily (eg,
> depending on input parameters), then the programmer has to make a
> trade-off whether he/she want's to benefit from mo_consume but slow down
> other calls due to additional barriers (ie, when this function is called
> from non-[[carries_dependency]] functions), or vice versa.  (IOW,
> because of the function granularity, other code's performance is
> affected.)
>
> If a compiler wants to implement dependency tracking just for a few
> constructs (e.g., operators -> + ...) and use barriers otherwise, then
> this decision must be compatible with how all this is handled in other
> compilation units.  Thus, compiler optimizations effectively become part
> of the ABI, which doesn't seem right.
>
> I hope these examples illustrate my concerns about the implementability
> in practice of this.  It's also why I've suggested to move from an
> opt-out approach as in the current standard (ie, with kill_dependency())
> to an opt-in approach for conservative dependency tracking (e.g., with a
> preserve_dependencies(exp) call, where exp will not be optimized in a
> way that removes any dependencies).  This wouldn't help with many
> optimizations being prevented, but it should at least help programmers
> contain the problem to smaller regions of code.
>
> I'm not aware of any implementation that tries to track dependencies, so
> I can't give any real performance numbers.  This could perhaps be
> simulated, but I'm not sure whether a realistic case would be made
> without at least supporting [[carries_dependency]] properly in the
> compiler, which would be some work.
>
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