Re: How to make use of instruction scheduling to improve performance?

["Ramana Radhakrishnan" <ramana dot r at gmail dot com>]

Hi,


On 7/28/07, 吴曦 <wu.andrew.xi@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > I am working on gcc 4.1.1 and itanium2 architecture. I instrumented
> > > > > each ld and st instruction in final_scan_insn() by looking at the insn
> > > > > template (These instrumentations are used to do some security checks).
> > > > > These instrumentations incur high performance overhead when running
> > > > > specint benchmarks. However, these instrumentations contain high
> > > > > dependencies between instructions so that I want to use instruction
> > > > > scheduling to improve the performance.
> > > > >     In the current implementation, the instrumentations are emitted as
> > > > > assembly instructions (not insns). What should I do to make use of the
> > > > > instruction scheduler?
> > > >
> > > > If I understand your description, you are adding instrumentation code,
> > > > and you want to expose that code to the scheduler.  What you need to
> > > > do in that case is to add the code as RTL instructions before the
> > > > scheduling pass runs.  You will need to figure out the RTL which will
> > > > do what you want.  Then you will need to insert it around the
> > >                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > > > instructions which you want to instrument.  You will probably want to
> > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > > Before the second scheduling pass, how to identify that one insn will
> > > be output as a load instruction (or store instruction)? In the final,
> > > i use get_insn_template() to do this matching. Can I use the same
> > > method before the second scheduling pass? If not, would you mind
> > > giving some hints? thx
> >
> > Please send followups to the mailing list, not just to me.  Thanks.
> >
> > You should just match on the RTL.  I don't know enough about the
> > Itanium to tell you precisely what to look for.  But, for example, you
> > might look for
> >    s = single_set (PATTERN (insn));
> >    if (s != NULL && (MEM_P (SET_SRC (s) || MEM_P (SET_DEST (s)))))
> >      ...
> >
> > Ian
> >
>
> Thanks. I observe that the 2nd instruction scheduling happens after
> the local and global allocation. However, in my instrumentation, I
> need several registers to do computation, can I allocate registers to
> do computation in the instrumentation code just before the 2nd
> instruction scheduling? If so, would you mind giving some hints on the
> interfaces that I could make use of.

Generally you should be able to create new temporaries for such
calculations before register allocation / reload . Otherwise you might
have to resort to reserving a couple of registers in your ABI for such
computations if you wanted these generated after reload (you could
have a split that did that after reload but where in the function do
you want to insert the instrumentation code ?)

From what you are indicating - there isn't enough detail about where
in the function body you are inserting such instrumentation code  -

If you are doing such instrumentation in the prologue or epilogue of a
function, you could choose to use gen_reg_rtx to obtain a temporary
register.

So typically obtain a temporary register in the following manner
  rtx tmp_reg = gen_reg_rtx (<machine>mode);

Use the tmp_reg in whatever instruction you want to generate using the
corresponding register as one of the operands .  For these you might
want to use the corresponding gen_*** named functions .

cheers
Ramana








>    Besides,  what happens if I move the insertion of instrumentation
> before register allocation,  or even before the 1st scheduling pass,
> can I identify load/store instructions that early?
>


-- 
Ramana Radhakrishnan