Re: [PATCH 2/2] arm: lib: xor-neon: disable clang vectorization

[Arvind Sankar]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 07:14:36AM +0200, Adrian Ratiu wrote:
> Due to a Clang bug [1] neon autoloop vectorization does not happen or
> happens badly with no gains and considering previous GCC experiences
> which generated unoptimized code which was worse than the default asm
> implementation, it is safer to default clang builds to the known good
> generic implementation.
> 
> The kernel currently supports a minimum Clang version of v10.0.1, see
> commit 1f7a44f63e6c ("compiler-clang: add build check for clang 10.0.1").
> 
> When the bug gets eventually fixed, this commit could be reverted or,
> if the minimum clang version bump takes a long time, a warning could
> be added for users to upgrade their compilers like was done for GCC.
> 
> [1] https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40976
> 
> Signed-off-by: Adrian Ratiu <adrian.ratiu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  arch/arm/include/asm/xor.h | 3 ++-
>  arch/arm/lib/Makefile      | 3 +++
>  arch/arm/lib/xor-neon.c    | 4 ++++
>  3 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/arch/arm/include/asm/xor.h b/arch/arm/include/asm/xor.h
> index aefddec79286..49937dafaa71 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/include/asm/xor.h
> +++ b/arch/arm/include/asm/xor.h
> @@ -141,7 +141,8 @@ static struct xor_block_template xor_block_arm4regs = {
>  		NEON_TEMPLATES;			\
>  	} while (0)
>  
> -#ifdef CONFIG_KERNEL_MODE_NEON
> +/* disabled on clang/arm due to https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40976 */
> +#if defined(CONFIG_KERNEL_MODE_NEON) && !defined(CONFIG_CC_IS_CLANG)
>  
>  extern struct xor_block_template const xor_block_neon_inner;
>  
> diff --git a/arch/arm/lib/Makefile b/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
> index 6d2ba454f25b..53f9e7dd9714 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
> +++ b/arch/arm/lib/Makefile
> @@ -43,8 +43,11 @@ endif
>  $(obj)/csumpartialcopy.o:	$(obj)/csumpartialcopygeneric.S
>  $(obj)/csumpartialcopyuser.o:	$(obj)/csumpartialcopygeneric.S
>  
> +# disabled on clang/arm due to https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40976
> +ifndef CONFIG_CC_IS_CLANG
>  ifeq ($(CONFIG_KERNEL_MODE_NEON),y)
>    NEON_FLAGS			:= -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=softfp -mfpu=neon
>    CFLAGS_xor-neon.o		+= $(NEON_FLAGS)
>    obj-$(CONFIG_XOR_BLOCKS)	+= xor-neon.o
>  endif
> +endif
> diff --git a/arch/arm/lib/xor-neon.c b/arch/arm/lib/xor-neon.c
> index e1e76186ec23..84c91c48dfa2 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/lib/xor-neon.c
> +++ b/arch/arm/lib/xor-neon.c
> @@ -18,6 +18,10 @@ MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
>   * Pull in the reference implementations while instructing GCC (through
>   * -ftree-vectorize) to attempt to exploit implicit parallelism and emit
>   * NEON instructions.
> +
> + * On Clang the loop vectorizer is enabled by default, but due to a bug
> + * (https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40976) vectorization is broke
> + * so xor-neon is disabled in favor of the default reg implementations.
>   */
>  #ifdef CONFIG_CC_IS_GCC
>  #pragma GCC optimize "tree-vectorize"
> -- 
> 2.29.0
> 

It's actually a bad idea to use #pragma GCC optimize. This is basically
the same as tagging all the functions with __attribute__((optimize)),
which GCC does not recommend for production use, as it _replaces_
optimization options rather than appending to them, and has been
observed to result in dropping important compiler flags.

There've been a few discussions recently around other such cases:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201028171506.15682-1-ardb@xxxxxxxxxx/
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201028081123.GT2628@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/

For this file, given that it is supposed to use -ftree-vectorize for the
whole file anyway, is there any reason it's not just added to CFLAGS via
the Makefile? This seems to be the only use of pragma optimize in the
kernel.