The nvptx port [0/11+]

Bernd Schmidt bernds@codesourcery.com
Mon Oct 20 14:19:00 GMT 2014


This is a patch kit that adds the nvptx port to gcc. It contains 
preliminary patches to add needed functionality, the target files, and 
one somewhat optional patch with additional target tools. There'll be 
more patch series, one for the testsuite, and one to make the offload 
functionality work with this port. Also required are the previous four 
rtl patches, two of which weren't entirely approved yet.

For the moment, I've stripped out all the address space support that got 
bogged down in review by brokenness in our representation of address 
spaces. The ptx address spaces are of course still defined and used 
inside the backend.

Ptx really isn't a usual target - it is a virtual target which is then 
translated by another compiler (ptxas) to the final code that runs on 
the GPU. There are many restrictions, some imposed by the GPU hardware, 
and some by the fact that not everything you'd want can be represented 
in ptx. Here are some of the highlights:
  * Everything is typed - variables, functions, registers. This can
    cause problems with K&R style C or anything else that doesn't
    have a proper type internally.
  * Declarations are needed, even for undefined variables.
  * Can't emit initializers referring to their variable's address since
    you can't write forward declarations for variables.
  * Variables can be declared only as scalars or arrays, not
    structures. Initializers must be in the variable's declared type,
    which requires some code in the backend, and it means that packed
    pointer values are not representable.
  * Since it's a virtual target, we skip register allocation - no good
    can probably come from doing that twice. This means asm statements
    aren't fixed up and will fail if they use matching constraints.
  * No support for indirect jumps, label values, nonlocal gotos.
  * No alloca - ptx defines it, but it's not implemented.
  * No trampolines.
  * No debugging (at all, for now - we may add line number directives).
  * Limited C library support - I have a hacked up copy of newlib
    that provides a reasonable subset.
  * malloc and free are defined by ptx (these appear to be
    undocumented), but there isn't a realloc. I have one patch for
    Fortran to use a malloc/memcpy helper function in cases where we
    know the old size.

All in all, this is not intended to be used as a C (or any other source 
language) compiler. I've gone through a lot of effort to make it work 
reasonably well, but only in order to get sufficient test coverage from 
the testsuites. The intended use for this is only to build it as an 
offload compiler, and use it through OpenACC by way of lto1. That leaves 
the question of how we should document it - does it need the usual 
constraint and option documentation, given that user's aren't expected 
to use any of it?

A slightly earlier version of the entire patch kit was bootstrapped and 
tested on x86_64-linux. Ok for trunk?


Bernd



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