Hi there. Connect is just around the corner. Have a look at:
https://wiki.linaro.org/MichaelHope/Sandbox/Q4.11Plans
for a summary of the toolchain sessions and hacking topics.
It would be great to have kernel and OCTO input in the ARM STM driver,
Kernel debugging, and KVM sessions.
-- Michael
Hi Folks,
Draft agenda for the performance meeting next week at Connect -
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+spec/linaro-toolchain-performa…
Are there any topics that people would like to bring up during this
meeting other than the ones listed here ? I suspect that we'll
probably just have about 10-15 minutes for a topic in this case. I am
not considering discussing PGO related stuff in this session given
that we've got another session in which we can discuss this.
Thoughts ?
cheers
Ramana
Hi Folks,
I've been trying to capture what we want to do in terms of hacking
time and some of the performance related backlog that we have in the
system. I have done so here.
https://wiki.linaro.org/RamanaRadhakrishnan/Sandbox/Q411ConnectGCCPerfPlan
I'm on vacation tomorrow but should be picking email for sometime
during the day.
Thoughts about what else we could be doing in this area or if there's
a better way we could use our hacking time.
cheers
Ramana
---
At the moment ARM eglibc doesn't support the functions declared
in ucontext.h: getcontext(), setcontext(), swapcontext() and
makecontext(). Instead you get implementations which always
fail and set errno to ENOSYS.
QEMU uses these functions to implement coroutines. Although there
is a fallback implementation in terms of threads, there are reasons
why using the fallback is suboptimal:
* its performance is worse
* it will be less tested, because x86_64 and i386 both implement
the ucontext functions and so QEMU on those hosts will be using
different code paths
* I'm not aware of a good way at configure time to detect whether
getcontext() et al will always fail without actually running a
test binary, which won't work in a cross-compile setup. (If eglibc
just didn't provide the functions at all this would be much
simpler...)
We're going to care about performance and reliability of QEMU on
ARM hosts as we start to support KVM on Cortex-A15, so it would
be good if we could add ucontext function support to eglibc as
part of that effort.
Opinions? Have I missed some good reason why there isn't an
ARM implementation of these functions?
(I'm aware that the ucontext functions have been removed from
the latest version of the POSIX spec; however AFAIK there's no
equivalent functionality that replaces them so I think they're
still worth having implementations of for parity with other
architectures.)
-- PMM
==Progress===
* Some upstream patch review.
* Spent time looking at LP 836588 which is a case where CSE removes a
particular label access in one case but doesn't remove it from the
list of things in the constant pool which is quite bizarre. Will
probably need some help with looking into this one.
* Sent out vcvt.f32 and vcvt.f64 patches .
* Connect preparation - laptop cleanup and getting it finally onto an
x86_64 distribution.
* Looked at some of the vec_perm / vec_rev cases in Neon with Ira.
* Spent some time looking at some of Andrew's issues with generic-v7a
tuning especially the cases where it was doing better and gave some
suggestions.
=== Plans ===
* Prepare for Connect.
* Prepare by looking at some of the large differences between
various comparative benchmarks.
* Some research into PGO related stuff.
* Try to upstream some more of my patches in the backlog before the
end of the week.
* Finish off some internal paperwork.
* I'm off on 26th - Wednesday.
Absences.
* 26th Oct - Day off.
* 31st Oct - 4th Nov - Linaro Connect Q4.11
* 08 Nov - 11 Nov - Tentatively booked
* Dec 19 - 31st Dec - Tentatively booked
Continued looking at my constant reuse optimization. I've identified a
couple of hundred optimization opportunities in the whole of gcc itself,
which is fewer than I had hoped. There are almost no opportunities when
compiling for size as constants are always loaded from a constant pool
in that case (I'm not sure why that's the case, given that this isn't
any more space efficient than movw+movt, unless it can share the
constant in more than one place).
Backported my -mtune=native patch to Linaro GCC.
Backported my generic tuning patch to Linaro GCC.
Backported my pr50717 patch to Linaro, and pushed to Launchpad for testing.
Analysed my benchmark results I made to aid generic tuning.
Disappointingly the A8/A9 tuning is not as beneficial as one would like.
In fact, the existing generic tuning patch (which was supposed to be a
framework only) is actually quite competitive and gives better
performance in some cases.
Set more benchmarks running, this time with NEON enabled. That's about
36 hour's worth on A9, and more like 90 hours on my A8 (obviously,
there's some difference in the clock speeds there).
Discovered that my native tuning code won't compile with a C++ compiler
(GCC Bugzilla PR50809). Tested and committed a fix upstream.
== GDB ==
* Worked on support for cross-platform core file generation.
Posted initial set of patches for comments.
* Created "Toolchain support for kernel debugging" blueprint.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter | Geschäftsführung: Dirk
Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen | Registergericht: Amtsgericht
Stuttgart, HRB 243294
Hi,
I made some progress on transforming the hacks I did to get libunwind
working on Android into proper patches that can go upstream. Things learned:
* bionic employs OpenBSD header files that therefore lack some GNU and
ARM specific defines (only small fix needed - plan is to change
libunwind to work with non-patched bionic too)
* Android basically provides all the functionality that is required
for libunwind-ptrace - but...
* no one seems to build libunwind with remote unwind functionality
(including libunwind-ptrace) only
* most of the issues can be avoided by changing libunwind to be more
portable
Regards
Ken
