[PATCH v2] rs6000: Expand vec_insert in expander instead of gimple [PR79251]

[Segher Boessenkool]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 04:28:19PM +0200, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 3:49 PM Segher Boessenkool
> <segher@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 10:26:51AM +0200, Richard Biener wrote:
> > > Hmm, yeah - I guess that's what should be addressed first then.
> > > I'm quite sure that in case 'v' is not on the stack but in memory like
> > > in my case a SImode store is better than what we get from
> > > vec_insert - in fact vec_insert will likely introduce a RMW cycle
> > > which is prone to inserting store-data-races?
> >
> > The other way around -- if it is in memory, and was stored as vector
> > recently, then reading back something shorter from it is prone to
> > SHL/LHS problems.  There is nothing special about the stack here, except
> > of course it is more likely to have been stored recently if on the
> > stack.  So it depends how often it has been stored recently which option
> > is best.  On newer CPUs, although they can avoid SHL/LHS flushes more
> > often, the penalty is relatively bigger, so memory does not often win.
> >
> > I.e.: it needs to be measured.  Intuition is often wrong here.
> 
> But the current method would simply do a direct store to memory
> without a preceeding read of the whole vector.

The problem is even worse the other way: you do a short store here, but
so a full vector read later.  If the store and read are far apart, that
is fine, but if they are close (that is on the order of fifty or more
insns), there can be problems.

There often are problems over function calls (where the compiler cannot
usually *see* how something is used).


Segher