- linaro-toolchain - lists.linaro.org

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/other-linaro-n-cross-compilers: - wrote patches for creating backports PPA - each component [1] generates versioned -source binary package (eglibc-2.12.1-source etc) - a-c-t-b [2] got "PPA" boolean variable in rules to have one source package for archive and for backports - I built a-c-t-b with all components backports from natty in lucid pbuilder Bugs: - 684625 - libc6 is compiled for armv5 instead of armv7a - confirmed, wrote fix, will sent for review and merge - 683832 - gcc fails to cross compile Qt - confirmed in maverick for cross gcc 4.4/4.5 - need to check with fixed (bug 684625) toolchain - FTFBS of armel-cross-toolchain-base 1.53/natty - issue is lack of LTO plugin built in gcc/stage2 - have first patches for it, need to test 1. component = eglibc, gcc-4.4/4.5, binutils, linux 2. a-c-t-b = armel-cross-toolchain-base Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

14 years, 11 months

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[ACTIVITY] Nov.29 -- Dec.05

by Chung-Lin Tang

== GCC related == * PR44557, Thumb-1 ICE: originally thought a fix of constraint will work, however after simplifying the testcase, received another ICE in postreload, due to a load of IP, which is not permitted in Thumb-1. Looking at some reload internals as part of fixing this. * PR45416, ARM code generation regression. First fix from last week hit an assert FAIL in the alias-oracle due to ARRAY_REFs not being handled there. Also, further found some expand code quality regressions due to this change. Turned to a more conservative fix by adding the related TER substitution to expr.c:do_store_flag(), which produced more focused results. However, 32-bit x86 slightly regressed in the same flag storing code (did not use the 'testl' insn after the change). Still WIP. * PR46667, submitted a section type conflict bug fix upstream, see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-12/msg00137.html , which supposedly fixes the upstream ARM-Linux C++ build. Jan Hubicka later gave another fix, so still in discussion. * PR45886, this PR is call for backporting the __ARM_PCS* preprocessor symbols to gcc-4_5-branch. Submitted a mail to ask for approval, no response. == libffi VFP hard-float == * PR46508, libffi VFP assembly error. I missed this earlier due to using a compiler configured with --with-fpu=vfp. Submitted assembly fix to add the needed FPU directives. Committed to upstream trunk. == This week == * Hope to wrap up the above in-progress PRs, as well as continue to look at other PRs of interest. * LP #685534 popped up on Sunday, and manifests on upstream trunk too. Add this to queue. * Think about GCC performance opportunities (Linaro)

14 years, 11 months

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[ACTIVITY] Nov 29th -- Dec 5

by Yao Qi

== Linaro GCC == * Reproduce regression of my ldm/stm backport on 4.5, which is caused by the other two merged patches in ifcvt.c. Fix them. Propose merge request again. Learn how to sync/merge changes from one branch to the other branch. * Fix VFP_D0_D7 handling in predicate vfp_register_operand. Approved and committed upstreams. * Test new regrename improvement patch on x86_64, and measure effectiveness of it on ARM. Code size of bash-3.2 is reduced 0.2% with option "-march=armv7a -mthumb -O2 -frename-registers". Eric B. is almost OK with this patch except some wording in comments. == Linaro GDB == As discussed in UDS, I'll move to GDB work for gdb correctness. http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/planner#tr-toolchain-gdb-correctness In this month, I'll focus on GDB testsuite failures fixing. * Analyze LP:615978, failures in gdb.base/annota3.exp. Signal is not delivered to child while software single-stepping. The same as LP:649121. * Fix failure in gdb.xml/tdesc-regs.exp. LP:685494 It is caused by a target triplet matching error, when target is set to "armv7l-linux-gnueabi". Target triplet matching in test cases should be changed. Patch is being reviewed in upstreams. * LP:616000 failures caused by -fstack-protector. Homework to understand frame-related code in GDB. Got some big picture of usage of some key data structures inside GDB on frame. Compared with prologue with and without stack-protector, find some difference there. Still no clue on how to educate GDB to identify whether stack-protector is turned on or off. * Fix one failure in printcmds.exp. LP:685702 This test case on 7.2 branch is a little bit out of date, compared with GDB trunk. Backport one patch on trunk to 7.2 branch can fix this problem. Backport patch is being reviewed in upstreams. * Neon registers in kernel dump file. LP:615972 Ask Linaro kernel WG to see how to move forward on this. Discussion is still ongoing. == This Week == * Report the rest of GDB testsuite failures. * Pick up some of them, and fix. * Pass gcc patches in my queue one by one to gcc-patches to review. -- Yao (齐尧)

14 years, 11 months

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[ACTIVITY] report week 48

by Peter Maydell

RAG: Red: Amber: Green: Milestones: | Planned | Estimate | Actual | finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | | get valgrind into linaro PPA | 2010-09-15 | 2010-09-28 | 2010-09-28 | complete a qemu-maemo update | 2010-09-24 | 2010-09-22 | 2010-09-22 | finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 | Progress: * merge-correctness-fixes: ** Nathan Froyd (CodeSourcery) has reviewed a lot of my ARM patches. Most were OK, one or two needed tweaking We seem to have come to agreement on how best to treat the API between qemu and the softfloat library, and I have a V2 patchset ready to mail as soon as Nathan has commented on the final patch. ** posted a patch to rename a very misleading _is_nan() function ** identified list of correctness patches in meego and samsung trees and issues noted within ARM ** qemu: posted patch to remove an unused function ** started looking at the first patch in the meego tree, which fixes VQSHL. I have already discovered a bug in this insn not covered by the meego patch... Meetings: toolchain, PD update, ARM 20th birthday party Plans: - qemu consolidation Issues: * Locking in qemu is definitely insufficient, especially (but not exclusively) when running multi-threaded programs in linux-user mode. https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/668799 has an example problem and some discussion; I'm hoping some other qemu developers have an opinion, but the nicest approach IMHO would involve fairly invasive changes to how qemu implements interrupting a cpu which is executing TCG code. Not sure where this should sit in the priority list. Things of note: - there has been some discussion of broadening the "KVM Forum" conference to include other virtualisation related topics including Xen and also the TCG aspects of Qemu. Still all up in the air but possibly colocated with LinuxCon in Vancouver in August. See: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KVM_Forum_2011 Absences: (complete to end of 2010) Fri 17 Dec - Tue 4 Jan inclusive. 2011: Dallas Linaro sprint 9-15 Jan. Holiday 22 Apr - 2 May.

14 years, 12 months

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[ACTIVITY] Weekly status

by Richard Sandiford

== This week == * Looked at a generic bug in GAS's handling of ifuncs. Sent a patch upstream: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2010-11/msg00495.html Alan quite reasonably wanted me to test on a variety of targets. For want of anything better, I wrote a script to test Alan's list of 118 targets. Tests went OK, patch committed upstream. * Wrote more IFUNC tests. Found another problem (as yet unresolved). * Looked at vector stuff, but nothing tangible yet. (I also had to spend some time on other IBM things, sorry.) == Next week == * Away Monday and Tuesday. * More STT_GNU_IFUNC and vectors. Richard

14 years, 12 months

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[ACTIVITY] 2010-12-03

by David Gilbert

* Benchmarking of simple package builds with various string routine versions; not finding enough difference in the noise to make any large conclusions * Looking at the string routine behaviour with perf to see where the time is going - getting hit by the Linaro kernels on silverbell missing Perf enablement in the config - Useful amount of time does seem to be spent outside the main 'fast aligned' chunks of code - pushing/popping registers does seem to be pretty expensive * Started looking at libffi and hard float - Started writing a spec https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Specs/LibFFI-variadic - It's going to need an API change to libffi, although the change shouldn't break any existing code on existing platforms where they work. * Helping with the image testing Dave

14 years, 12 months

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[ACTIVITY] weekly status

by Ken Werner

Hi, * got llvm+clang working on ARM: https://wiki.linaro.org/KenWerner/Sandbox/HowToBuildToolchainComponents#llv… * checked whether llvm inlines the __sync_* builtins on ARM or not: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/AtomicMemoryOperations#LLVM * developed a patch for #681138 (tested with current gcc-linaro) * spent some time for bootstrapping the GCC trunk in order to test and post that patch on the ml but wasn't successful (finally ran into the issues discussed at #659713) * did some verification work on #674090 * preparing to work on the "investigate current developer tools" item Regards Ken

14 years, 12 months

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Using inline NEON code

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Currently you can't use NEON instructions in inline assembly if the compiler is set to -mfpu=vfp such as Ubuntu's -mfpu=vfpv3-d16. Trying code like this: int main() { asm("veor d1, d2, d3"); return 0; } gives an error message like: test.s: Assembler messages: test.s:29: Error: selected processor does not support Thumb mode `veor d1,d2,d3' The problem is that -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 has two jobs: it tells the compiler what instructions to use, and also tells the assembler what instructions are valid. We might want the compiler to use the VFP for compatibility or power reasons, but still be able to use NEON instructions in inline assembler without passing extra flags. Inserting ".fpu neon" to the start of the inline assembly fixes the problem. Is this valid? Are assembly files with multiple .fpu statements allowed? Passing '-Wa,-mfpu=neon' to GCC doesn't work as gas seems to ignore the second -mfpu. What's the best way to handle this? Some options are: * Add '.fpu neon' directives to the start of any inline assembly * Separate out the features, so you can specify the capabilities with one option and restrict the compiler to a subset with another. Something like '-mfpu=neon -mfpu-tune=vfpv3-d16' * Relax the assembler so that any instructions are accepted. We'd lose some checking of GCC's output though. -- Michael

14 years, 12 months

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[ACTIVITY] Nov 29 - Dec 2

by Ira Rosen

- Continued looking into NEON special loads and stores. - Benchmarks: concentrated on EEMBC Telecom: - autcor gets vectorized - viterbi, besides strided data accesses, needs to sink conditional stores to allow if-conversion and make the main loop vectorizable. Since the potential here is 4x, I think it's worthwhile to work on this. - conven, fbital also have control-flow issue, but much more complicated than viterbi - fft has a problem with loop count, I would like to investigate this a bit more - diffmeasure doesn't seem to have vectorization potential - Fixed GCC PR 46663 on trunk, testing the fix for 4.3, 4.4, 4.5.

14 years, 12 months

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[PATCH, WIP] NEON quadword vectors in big-endian mode (#10061, #7306)

by Julian Brown

Hi, Here's a work-in-progress patch which fixes many execution failures seen in big-endian mode when -mvectorize-with-neon-quad is in effect (which is soon to be the default, if we stick to the current plan). But, it's pretty hairy, and I'm not at all convinced it's not working "for the wrong reason" in a couple of places. I'm mainly posting to gauge opinions on what we should do in big-endian mode. This patch works with the assumption that quad-word vectors in big-endian mode are in "vldm" order (i.e. with constituent double-words in little-endian order: see previous discussions). But, that's pretty confusing, leads to less than optimal code, and is bound to cause more problems in the future. So I'm not sure how much effort to expend on making it work right, given that we might be throwing that vector ordering away in the future (at least in some cases: see below). The "problem" patterns are as follows. * Full-vector shifts: these don't work with big-endian vldm-order quad vectors. For now, I've disabled them, although they could potentially be implemented using vtbl (at some cost). * Widening moves (unpacks) & widening multiplies: when widening from D-reg to Q-reg size, we must swap double-words in the result (I've done this with vext). This seems to work fine, but what "hi" and "lo" refer to is rather muddled (in my head!). Also they should be expanders instead of emitting multiple assembler insns. * Narrowing moves: implemented by "open-coded" permute & vmovn (for 2x D-reg -> D-reg), or 2x vmovn and vrev64.32 for Q-regs (as suggested by Paul). These seem to work fine. * Reduction operations: when reducing Q-reg values, GCC currently tries to extract the result from the "wrong half" of the reduced vector. The fix in the attached patch is rather dubious, but seems to work (I'd like to understand why better). We can sort those bits out, but the question is, do we want to go that route? Vectors are used in three quite distinct ways by GCC: 1. By the vectorizer. 2. By the NEON intrinsics. 3. By the "generic vector" support. For the first of these, I think we can get away with changing the vectorizer to use explicit "array" loads and stores (i.e. vldN/vstN), so that vector registers will hold elements in memory order -- so, all the contortions in the attached patch will be unnecessary. ABI issues are irrelevant, since vectors are "invisible" at the source code layer generally, including at ABI boundaries. For the second, intrinsics, we should do exactly what the user requests: so, vectors are essentially treated as opaque objects. This isn't a problem as such, but might mean that instruction patterns written using "canonical" RTL for the vectorizer can't be shared with intrinsics when the order of elements matters. (I'm not sure how many patterns this would refer to at present; possibly none.) The third case would continue to use "vldm" ordering, so if users inadvertantly write code such as: res = vaddq_u32 (*foo, bar); instead of writing an explicit vld* intrinsic (for the load of *foo), the result might be different from what they expect. It'd be nice to diagnose such code as erroneous, but that's another issue. The important observation is that vectors from case 1 and from cases 2/3 never interact: it's quite safe for them to use different element orderings, without extensive changes to GCC infrastructure (i.e., multiple internal representations). I don't think I quite realised this previously. So, anyway, back to the patch in question. The choices are, I think: 1. Apply as-is (after I've ironed out the wrinkles), and then remove the "ugly" bits at a later point when vectorizer "array load/store" support is implemented. 2. Apply a version which simply disables all the troublesome patterns until the same support appears. Apologies if I'm retreading old ground ;-). (The CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS fragment is necessary to generate good code for the quad-word vec_pack_trunc_<mode> pattern. It would eventually be applied as a separate patch.) Thoughts? Julian ChangeLog gcc/ * config/arm/arm.h (CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS): Allow changing mode of vector registers. * config/arm/neon.md (vec_shr_<mode>, vec_shl_<mode>): Disable in big-endian mode. (reduc_splus_<mode>, reduc_smin_<mode>, reduc_smax_<mode>) (reduc_umin_<mode>, reduc_umax_<mode>) (neon_vec_unpack<US>_lo_<mode>, neon_vec_unpack<US>_hi_<mode>) (neon_vec_<US>mult_lo_<mode>, neon_vec_<US>mult_hi_<mode>) (vec_pack_trunc_<mode>, neon_vec_pack_trunc_<mode>): Handle big-endian mode for quad-word vectors.

14 years, 12 months

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Building a cross compiler

by Michael Hope

Hi there. I've had a few questions recently about how to build a cross compiler, so I took a stab at writing the steps down in a Makefile. See: https://code.launchpad.net/~michaelh1/+junk/cross-build Hopefully it's easy to follow. It uses a binary sysroot and gives you vanilla binutils 2.20 and Linaro GCC 2010.11 in a good enough way that you can cross-compile for Maverick. The script is minimal and trades readability for flexibility. Note that Marcin's cross compiler packages or the Embedian toolchains are a better way to go, but if you want to see the steps involved check out the script. Marcin or Matthias, would you mind reviewing it? -- Michael

14 years, 12 months

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[ACTIVITY] November 21-25

by Ira Rosen

Hi, - the struggle with the board took a lot of time - continued to investigate special loads/stores - looked for benchmarks: EEMBC Consumer filters rgbcmy and rgbyiq should be vectorizable once vld3, vst3/4 are supported EEMBC Telecom viterbi is supposed to give 4x on NEON once vectorized (according to http://www.jp.arm.com/event/pdf/forum2007/t1-5.pdf slide 29). My old version of viterbi is not vectorizable because of if-conversion problems. I'd be really happy to check the new version (it is supposed to be slightly different). Looking into other EEMBC benchmarks. FFMPEG http://www.ffmpeg.org/ (got this from Rony Nandy from User Platforms). It contains hand-vectorized code for NEON. Investigating. I am probably taking a day off on Sunday. Ira

14 years, 12 months

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microoptimising atomic memory ops

by Peter Maydell

This wiki page came up during the toolchain call: https://wiki.linaro.org/Internal/People/KenWerner/AtomicMemoryOperations/ It gives the code generated for __sync_val_compare_and_swap as including a push {r4} / pop {r4} pair because it uses too many temporaries to fit them all in callee-saves registers. I think you can tweak it a bit to get rid of that: # int __sync_val_compare_and_swap (int *mem, int old, int new); # if the current value of *mem is old, then write new into *mem # r0: mem, r1 old, r2 new mov r3, r0 # move r0 into r3 dmb sy # full memory barrier .LSYT7: ldrex r0, [r3] # load (exclusive) from memory pointed to by r3 into r0 cmp r0, r1 # compare contents of r0 (mem) with r1 (old) -> updates the condition flag bne .LSYB7 # branch to LSYB7 if mem != old # This strex trashes the r0 we just loaded, but since we didn't take # the branch we know that r0 == r1 strex r0, r2, [r3] # store r2 (new) into memory pointed to by r3 (mem) # r0 contains 0 if the store was successful, otherwise 1 teq r0, #0 # compares contents of r0 with zero -> updates the condition flag bne .LSYT7 # branch to LSYT7 if r0 != 0 (if the store wasn't successful) # Move the value that was in memory into the right register to return it mov r0, r1 dmb sy # full memory barrier .LSYB7: bx lr # return I think you can do a similar trick with __sync_fetch_and_add (although you have to use a subtract to regenerate r0 from r1 and r2). On the other hand I just looked at the gcc code that does this and it's not simply dumping canned sequences out to the assembler, so maybe it's not worth the effort just to drop a stack push/pop. -- PMM

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] November 22nd-28th

by Julian Brown

== Linaro GCC == * Finished testing patch for lp675347 (QT inline-asm atomics), and send upstream for comments (no response yet). Suggested reverting a patch (which enabled -fstrict-volatile-bitfields by default on ARM) locally for Ubuntu in the bug log. * Continued working on NEON quad-word vectors/big-endian patch. This turned out to be slightly fiddlier than I expected: I think I now have semantics which make sense, though my patch requires (a) slight middle-end changes, and (b) workarounds for unexpected combiner behaviour re: subregs & sign/zero-extend ops. I will send a new version of the patch to linaro-toolchain fairly soon for comments.

15 years

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A question about thumb2 cbnz/cbz implementation in thumb2.md

by Revital1 Eres

Hello, I have a question about cbnz/cbz thumb-2 instruction implementation in thumb2.md file: I have an example where we jump to a label which appears before the branch; for example: L4 ... cmp r3, 0 bne .L4 It seems that cbnz instruction should be applied in this loop; replacing cmp+bne; however, cbnz fails to be applied as diff = ADDRESS (L4) - ADDRESS (bne .L4) is negative and according to thumb2_cbz in thumb2.md it should be 2<=diff<=128 (please see snippet below taken from thumb2_cbz). So I want to double check if the current implementation of thumb2_cbnz in thumb2.md needs to be changed to enable it. The following is from thumb2_cbnz in thumb2.md: [(set (attr "length") (if_then_else (and (ge (minus (match_dup 1) (pc)) (const_int 2)) (le (minus (match_dup 1) (pc)) (const_int 128)) (eq (symbol_ref ("which_alternative")) (const_int 0))) (const_int 2) (const_int 8)))] Thanks, Revital

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Weekly status

by Richard Sandiford

== This week == * More ARM testing of binutils support for STT_GNU_IFUNC. * Implemented the GLIBC support for STT_GNU_IFUNC. Simple ARM testcases seem to run correctly. * Ran the GLIBC testsuite -- which includes some ifunc coverage -- but haven't analysed the results yet. * Started looking at Thumb for STT_GNU_IFUNC. The problem is that BFD internally represents Thumb symbols with an even value and a special st_type (STT_ARM_TFUNC); this is also the old, pre-EABI external representation. We need something different for STT_GNU_IFUNC. * Tried making BFD represent Thumb symbols as odd-value functions internally. I got it to "work", but I wasn't really happy with the results. * Looked at alternatives, and in the end decided that it would be better to have extra internal-only information in Elf_Internal_Sym. This "works" too, and seems cleaner to me. Sent an RFC upstream: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2010-11/msg00475.html * Started writing some Thumb tests for STT_GNU_IFUNC. * Investigated #618684. Turned out to be something that Bernd had already fixed upstream. Tested a backport. == Next week == * More IFUNC tests (ARM and Thumb, EGLIBC and binutils). Richard

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Nov.22 -- Nov.28

by Chung-Lin Tang

== Linaro and upstream GCC == * LP #674146, dpkg segfaults during debootstrap on natty armel: analyzed and found this should be a case of PR44768, backported mainline revision 161947 to fix this. * LP #641379, bitfields poorly optimized. Discussed some with Andrew Stubbs. * GCC bugzilla PR45416: Code generation regression on ARM. Been looking at this regression, that started from the expand from SSA changes since 4.5-experimental. The problem seems to be TER not properly being substituted during expand (compared to prior "convert to GENERIC then expand"). I now have a patch for this, which fixes the PR's testcase, but when testing current upstream trunk, hit an assert fail ICE on several testcases in the alias-oracle; it does however, test without regressions on a 4.5 based compiler. I am still looking at the upstream failures. == This week == * Continue with GCC issues and PRs. * Think about GCC performance opportunities (Linaro)

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Nov. 22 -- Nov. 28

by Zach Welch

== Last Week == * Started writing libunwind support for ARM-specific unwinding, but realized that the native ARM toolchain may be causing problems. Spent time trying to isolate the issues, but haven't found the culprit yet. * Began to consider the possibility of developing an ARM-specific unwinding library which would integrate into libunwind (and be reusable elsewhere). Basically, the ARM.ex{idx,tbl} sections are unique to ARM. * Looked at other applications where unwinding functionality already exists to see how ARM unwinding is done (e.g. GDB). Could/should that functionality be replaced with calls to libunwind (or to the aforementioned ARM-specific helper library)? == This Week == * Continue to implement ARM-specific unwinding in libunwind. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] 22nd -- 28th Nov.

by Yao Qi

== Linaro GCC == * LP:634738: Firstly, fix this in combiner. Try the other approach (without changes to arm.md) suggested by Andrew S, to fix arm_gen_constant in some cases to generate lsl/lsr ranther loading constant. Some piece of code in arm.c was written in 1998, hard to understand with few comments. During this, find some lsl/lsr can be replaced by ubfx. Use gen_extzv_t2 when arm_arch_thumb2 is true to transform lsl + lsr to ubfx. Two patches are ready. * LP:633243: Got build failures on FSF trunk for arm-none-linux-gnueabi. Test patch on FSF trunk 2010-10-21. No regression. * LP:638935: predicate "vfp_register_operand" should return true for VFP_D0_D7_REGS registers. Fixed. predicates {store,load}_multiple_operation assumes mode is SImode, and size of data is 4. Fix them to accept multiple VFP operations. Write three new test cases for stm/fldm/fstm pattern. Test patch on FSF trunk 2010-10-21. No regression. * SMS on thumb2. Discussed with Revital Eres back and forth on doloop pattern for thumb2. doloop pattern is not recognized so far on thumb2. Revital has a fix to thumb2_cbz pattern. After this fix, doloop pattern should be recognized. * Ping ARM fix PR45701 in gcc-patches for the fifth time. Still no reply. == This Week == * Look at regressions of ldm/stm backport on Linaro GCC 4.5. * Internal review of patch to LP:638935 * Try SMS on thumb2 for EEMBC, if Revital's thumb2_cbz pattern fix is accepted by upstreams. -- Yao (齐尧)

15 years

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New data centre host

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Our Versatile Express has been installed in the data centre and is available for use. See: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Hardware for the details. If you're a member of the Toolchain WG then you should already have an account. Dave is currently using this machine for benchmarking. Until we get more hardware, please use IRC or email to manage access. -- Michael

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] 22nd - 28th November

by Andrew Stubbs

Reviewed Yao's patch for AND optimization. Some back on forth on the best way to tackle this problem. LP:663939 - thumb2 constant loading - backported my patches to GCC 4.5 - awaiting review LP:595479 - .eh_frame broken. - Discovered this problem had been fixed (with Thomas' patch) since August, and has also been fixed upstream, albeit with an alternative patch. Nothing to do here. LP:641379 - bitfields poorly optimized. - analysed the problem. The code in cse.c that is supposed to fix this does not recognise the case. - created a patch and tested it for both GCC 4.6 and 4.5. - awaiting review LP:674146 - dpkg segfault. - started looking at this, but Chung-Lin took it first. While trying to reproduce lp:674146, I discovered that my IGEPv2 had a corrupted rootfs, again. I only fixed it last week, so I looked into it more deeply. It seems the SD card has developed at least one bad block. Reformatted, scanned and reinstalled the files from backup. I think the problem was caused by the daily apt package download (it was always those files that were corrupt), so I've disabled that. I've also disabled access-time-stamps. If it happens again I will have to consider using a different underlying filesystem format. LP:643479 / CS Issue:8610 - Multiply and accumulate optimization - created patches for both issues. - both were machine description subtleties. - backported the patches to 4.5 - the patches apply and work fine, but ... - found an extra problem with redundant moves - awaiting review GCC 4.6 - Created a new Launchpad series and branch to track GCC 4.6 development. - Set up the CS internal build config. - Tried to build the latest checkout and failed - glibc problem still unfixed - Jie has reported it now. - libquadmath build fails Merged FSF GCC trunk (pre-4.5.2) into Linaro GCC 4.5 tree. Merged the outstanding Launchpad merge requests into GCC 4.5. The testing showed regressions, so I backed out most of the merges and did them in smaller batches. Chung-Lin and Richard's patches passed the testing, so that leaves Yao's as the problem patch. I didn't get time to test this assertion this week. ---------------------------------- Next week: Vacation.

15 years

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Re: GCC Optimization Brain Storming Session

by Steven Bosscher

Andrew Stubbs wrote: > * Instruction set coverage. > - Are there any ARM/Thumb2 instructions that we are not taking > advantage of? [2] > - Do we test that we use the instructions we do have? [3] There is no general frame work to test instruction set coverage. The only way to find out, really, is to create some test cases where you expect the compiler to produce a certain insn. Is there a list of all ARM/Thumb2 instructions and the ones implemented in the GCC ARM machine descriptions? > * Constant pools > - it might be a very handy space optimization to have small > functions share one constant pool, but the way the passes work one > function at a time makes this hard. (LP:625233) There are also passes working on the entire program, or a partition. Isn't it more a question of how to group and process functions that are candidates for sharing a constant pool with a neighbor? Are there algorithms for this kind of pool sharing in the academic or ARM-specific literature? Other suggestions for the discussion: * Better use of conditional execution. - No idea how much this really helps for ARM, but there are bug reports about missed opportunities from time to time, so... - How to model conditional execution before register allocation? - How exploit opportunities better in GCC (ifcvt is inadequate and too late in the pipeline). - Also look at LLVM here, it appears to have a better cost model for if-conversion than GCC (taking into account a target-dependent branch misprediction penalty, for example). * Basic block re-ordering for speed/size. - The existing basic block reordering pass in GCC implements only a reordering strategy for speed. - The pass does not run at all for functions optimized for size. * Comparing ARM cost models and param settings to x86_64 - Compare, for some set of functions/benchmarks, the results of estimate_num_insns, estimate_operator_cost, and estimate_move_cost, between ARM and x86_64. Rationalize or fix any significant differences. See whether heuristics based on these functions require tuning for ARM. - Go through params.def and see if there are further ARM tuning opportunities. There are more than 100 DEFPARAMs and many of them guide heuristics but have only been tuned on x86_64. (There is set_default_param_value, but most backends do not change the defaults.) Hoping this is helpful, Ciao! Steven

15 years

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Silverbell dchroots

by Christian Robottom Reis

David G. requested a few packages installed on silverbell today (the quad-A9 VE porter machine we host in the datacenter). We got dchroots instead: ----- Forwarded message from LaMont Jones via RT <rt(a)admin.canonical.com> ----- Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:02:22 +0000 Subject: [rt.admin.canonical.com #42662] Simple package installs on silverbell On Fri Nov 26 17:08:28 2010, kiko(a)canonical.com wrote: > Hi there, > > Could we get installed on silverbell: > > build-essential > debhelper > fakeroot > > And could we get deb-src's added to sources.list and do an apt-get > update to allow us to apt-get source certain packages? This is for > simple compilation benchmarks. Thanks! Dchroot environments have been created on silverbell for both maverick and natty. Within the chroot, you can sudo apt-get install to install packages. apt-get update/dist-upgrade and installs that cause package removal will require a GSA to do them. To build for maverick: dchroot -c maverick (and then build however you want...) lamont ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Christian Robottom Reis | [+55] 16 9112 6430 | http://launchpad.net/~kiko Linaro Engineering VP | [ +1] 612 216 4935 | http://async.com.br/~kiko

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] weekly status

by Ken Werner

Hi, * the ARM __sync_* glibc-ports patch was accepted upstream * posted proposal for consolidating sync primitives but stdatomic seems to be the future * used my small gcc testsuite patch to verify __sync_* support of the gcc- linaro * created: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/AtomicMemoryOperations * looked into GOMP support on ARM: - #pragma omp atomic results in proper asm code (dmb, ldrex, strex, dmb) - #pragma omp flush results in a DMB instruction - #pragma omp barrier results to a call to GOMP_barrier (I'm not sure if this is the desired behavior) * started to look into #681138 Regards Ken

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] 2010-11-26

by David Gilbert

Hand crafted a simple strchr and comparing it with Libc: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Benchmarks/InitialStrchr It's interesting it's significantly faster than libc's on A9's, but on A8's it's slower for large sizes. I've not really looked why yet; my implementation is just the absolute simplest thumb-2 version. Did some ltrace profiling to see what typical strchr and strlen sizes were, and got a bit surprised at some of the typical behaviours (Lots of cases where strchr is being used in loops to see if another string contains anyone of a set of characters, a few cases of strchr being called with Null strings, and the corner case in the spec that allows you to call strchr with \0 as the character to search for). Trying some other benchmarks (pybench spends very little time in libc,package builds of simple packages seem to have a more interesting mix of libc use). Sorting out some of the red tape for contributing. Dave

15 years

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Notes on mixing D16/D32 code

by Michael Hope

It's a bit of a newbie question, but I've been wondering if you can intermix hard float VFPv3-D16 code with VFPv3-D32 code. You can as: According to the ABI: * d0-d15 are used for floating point parameters, no matter if you are D16 or D32 * d0-d15 are not preserved across function calls * d16-d31 must be preserved across function calls The scenarios are: A D32 function calls a D16 function: * The first 16 (!) parameters are passed in D0-D15 * Any remaining are passed on the stack * The D16 function doesn't know about D16-D31, doesn't use them, and hence preserves them A D16 function calls a D32 function: * The first 16 parameters are passed in D0-D15 * Any remaining are passed on the stack * The D32 function preserves any of the D16-D31 registers that it uses. Redundant, but fine. A D32 function (A) calls a D16 function (B) which calls a D32 function (C): * Parameters are OK, as above * B doesn't use D16-D31 and hence preserves them * C preserves any of the D16-D31 that it uses, which preserves them from A's point of view -- Michael

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] report week 47

by Peter Maydell

(short week: only three days) RAG: Red: Amber: Green: qemu: initial pull req sent; vfp-in-sighandlers patchset sent Milestones: | Planned | Estimate | Actual | finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | | get valgrind into linaro PPA | 2010-09-15 | 2010-09-28 | 2010-09-28 | complete a qemu-maemo update | 2010-09-24 | 2010-09-22 | 2010-09-22 | finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 | Progress: * qemu: final polish on a patchset for saving/restoring VFP and iWMMXT registers across linux-user mode signal handlers; patch series sent to mailing list * qemu: sent a pull request for a small set of ARM fixes (make SMC undef; fix PXHxx; fix saturating add/sub; fix VCVT) * reviewed arm semihosting SYS_GET_CMDLINE patch v2 * I now have enough qemu patches in flight that I'm tracking them at https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus (simple manual list for now, hopefully will be sufficient) Meetings: toolchain, pdsw-tools Plans - qemu consolidation Absences: (complete to end of 2010) Thu/Fri 25-26 Nov; Fri 17 Dec - Tue 4 Jan inclusive. (Dallas Linaro sprint 9-15 Jan.)

15 years

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__sync barriers

by Richard Sandiford

For the record, the thing I half-remembered on the call was: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-08/msg00697.html and: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-09/msg02112.html The problem is that all __sync operations besides __sync_lock_test_and_set and __sync_lock_release are defined to be full barriers. Using something like __sync_val_compare_and_swap for __arch_compare_and_exchange_val_*_acq and __arch_compare_and_exchange_val_*_rel may on some architectures be too heavyweight, since those macros only need acquire/after and release/before barriers. See in particular: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-08/msg00928.html from the first thread, where the feeling was that the future wasn't these __sync builtins, but the new C and C++ atomic memory support. Probably already known, sorry. I just wasn't sure that trying to convert everyone (not just ARM) to __sync_* was necessarily going to go down well. Richard

15 years

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Status Report 11-22-2010

by Zach Welch

== Last Week == * Reached the point with understanding libunwind where I can begin writing patches for parsing unwind information out of .ARM.exidx and .ARM.extab ELF sections. == This Week == * Begin writing support for ARM-specific unwind information to libunwind. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] November 15-21st

by Julian Brown

== Linaro GCC == * Continued looking at big-endian/quad-vector patch: attempted to figure out the proper semantics for vec_extract in big endian mode (about 1 day). Put on hold temporarily to work on lp675347, QT failing to build due to constraint failure in inline asm statements used for atomic operations: found the patch which introduced the failure, and suggested a workaround to the OP. Came up with a plausible-looking patch, and started testing it, after spending some time trying to figure out why ARM Linux mainline doesn't build at present. Patch sent upstream.

15 years

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Of instruction timings

by David Gilbert

Hi Richard, As per the discussion at this mornings call; I've reread the TRM and I agree with you about the LSLS being the same speed as the TST. (1 cycle) However as we agreed, the uxtb does look like 2 cycles v the AND 1 cycle. On the space v perf theme, one thing that would be interesting to know is whether there are any icache/issue stage limitations; i.e. if I have a stream of 32-bit Thumb-2 instructions that are all listed as 1 cycle and are all in i-cache, can they be fetched and issued fast enough, or is there a performance advantage to short instructions? Dave

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] 15th - 19th November

by Andrew Stubbs

LP:663939 - Thumb2 constants * Continued testing, found a few bugs. Tidied a few bits up. * Wrote some new testcases to go with the patch. LP:618684 - ICE * Begun looking at this one. So far I can't reproduce it. I have a debuggable native toolchain building, but it'd been delayed by hardware issues. In the course of testing I discovered that the ARM FSF config wasn't testing the right thing, so begun work on a new, more appropriate FSF build/test config for Linaro work. Also found the the SD card rootfs in my IGEPv2 board was corrupted. I've restored it from backup, and now it's working once more.

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Nov.15 -- Nov.21

by Chung-Lin Tang

== Linaro and upstream GCC == * Linaro launchpad issues: - LP #672833, x64-64 varargs regression: after testing pushed bzr branch for merging. - LP #634738, inefficient low bit extraction: some discussion with Yao. - LP #618684, ICE when building ziproxy: looked into and quickly found not reproducible anymore of Linaro 4.5 trunk. * Worked on some GCC bugzilla PRs: - PR44557, ICE in Thumb-1 secondary reload: this should be fixed by a change of the scratch operand constraint of "reload_inhi" from "r" to "l". Interesting to note that this was from the merged-arm-thumb-backend-branch merge, from about 10 years ago. - PR46508: libffi fails to build on VFP asm instructions, seems to need a '.fpu vfp' directive. Probably missed earlier because my toolchain was configured with --with-fpu=vfp. - PR45416: 4.6 code generation regression on ARM, after expand from SSA changes. Looking at this currently. == This week == * Look at Linaro issues with higher priority. * Continue working on GCC PRs.

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] (Yao Qi) Nov 15th -- 21st

by Yao Qi

== Linaro GCC == * Merge ldm/stm patch to Linaro 4.5 tree. Found two regressions on the last minute of proposing merge request in pass ce3. Revert one of ldm/stm patches about ifcvt. Complete testcase in branch. * Try Richard E.'s "TST to LSLS transformation" patch on cortex-a9 with FFMPEG. No speed improvements. * Various Linaro GCC Bug fixing. ** LP:634738 Follow the fix to GCC PR40697, and create a new patch, which emits extzv or shift rather than loading constants in some cases. Tested on FSF GCC trunk, and no regression. However, found a regression by eyes in pr44999.c, in which, ubfx (4byte) is generated, rather than uxth (2byte). uxth is produced by combiner from ashift and lshiftrt. During reading arm.c, find that constant handling in thumb2 should be improved to some extent. ** LP:633243 Re-implement regrename improvement, as Eric B. suggested in gcc-patches. Spend some time on understanding API in GCC related to hard-reg. Tested on x86_64-linux. No regression. ** LP:638935 Update my tree to FSF trunk, and find RTL seq for fldm/fstm peephole disappears due to fix to PR45722. Extend arm-ldmstm.ml to support vfp. Peephole and RTL patterns for vfp are done. Will revise arm.c:{load,store}_multiple_sequence to accept vfp data. Fix a bug in ldm/stm peephole when starting offset is negative. == This week == * LP:634738: Figure out how uxth is produced by combiner. * LP:633243: Test it on ARM. * LP:638935: Revise {load,store}_multiple_sequence to accept vfp data. -- Yao (齐尧)

15 years

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GCC SVN vs. BZR/LP

by Andrew Stubbs

Re my recent email "Upstream GCC feature freeze", I think we're agreed that we need to create a branch that tracks GCC 4.6 development, but has our own performance improvements included. The question is where to host it? Option 1: Launchpad/bzr Pros: * We need no permission to do it * The branch will naturally evolve into our 4.6 release series in time. * The 3-way merge works well (if slowly) * We can include patches that we have no intention of posting upstream ever * Our patch tracker will Just Work. * Merge requests will be available. Cons: * Bzr ;) * It's hidden away from the view of most GCC developers Option 2: GCC SVN branch Pros: * We can work in the open, submitting patches via gcc-patches, as usual * The final merge to GCC trunk (come stage 1) will be eased, a little Cons: * We can't really apply anything we want just for ourselves * we may end up maintaining an LP branch shadowing the svn branch * When we do want to do 4.6 in LP, we'll have to backport all our patches from 4.7, and this may no longer be straightforward. * Write permissions not clear. * Although I think you can just go ahead and do it? OK, so I'm sure I've missed some big ones. Please discuss! ;) I think the big question here is, when will we start wanting to make (unstable/experimental) Linaro GCC 4.6 releases? If we want to do it early, then we'll have no choice but to have an LP branch to release from. Andrew

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] week 46

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Like everyone from Toolchain WG I will share my activites in last week: 1. cross compilers for archive - discussed with doko about dropping update-alternatives use - wrote gcc-defaults-armel-cross 1.4 which does proper symlinks for cross compilers - wrote gcc-4.5-armel-cross 1.41 which removes update-alternatives support - wrote gcc-4.4-armel-cross 1.37 which removes update-alternatives support - wrote armel-cross-toolchain-base 1.53 which has all updates which I had - sent all of them to Steve for review Status of changes: - default version of armel cross compiler will be 4.5 like it is in Natty - both 4.4 and 4.5 will be provided as it is for native - any traces of update-alternatives use should be removed Needs to be done: - adding conflicts on older cross compilers to gcc-defaults-armel-cross Order of upload to archive: - armel-cross-toolchain-base - gcc-4.5-armel-cross - gcc-4.4-armel-cross - gcc-defaults-armel-cross 2. Checked few old bugs do they still apply: - Bugs #646729, #637454, #671455 are done with armel-cross-toolchain-base 1.52 (landed in maverick-proposed) Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] 2010-11-19

by David Gilbert

Short week. Finally got external hard drive for my beagle - makes it sanely possible to natively build things. Got eglibc cross built (Thanks to Wookey for pointing me in the right direction with the magic incantation of dpkg-buildpackage -aarmel --target=binary) and easily rebuilding . I have a version with the neon version of my memset built into it - it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference to my ghostscript benchmark though. Panda's aren't likely to turn up until mid December; arranging borrowing an A9 is turning out to be difficult, but it looks like we should be able to get access to the one in the London datacentre - although it has a disc problem at the moment. I did manage to get a colleague to try my tests on his own Toshiba AC-10 (Tegra-2 - no Neon); the graphs had approximately the same shape as my previous Panda tests. Memchr looked pretty good on there. Also trying to look at the sign off I need for various libc access. Dave

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] weekly status

by Ken Werner

I mainly worked on the atomic memory operations blueprint/item: * posted an updated patch for #643171 on the libc-ports ml after running the glibc testsuite natively on the vexpress * continued to learn about the ARM instructions involved :) * started to write some gcc testcases that scan the asm output of the __sync builtins (mainly to detect differences between the gcc versions - not sure how useful those tests would be for upstream as the sequences may easily change) Ken

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] report week 46

by Peter Maydell

RAG: Red: Amber: Green: Milestones: | Planned | Estimate | Actual | finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | | get valgrind into linaro PPA | 2010-09-15 | 2010-09-28 | 2010-09-28 | complete a qemu-maemo update | 2010-09-24 | 2010-09-22 | 2010-09-22 | finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 | Progress: * Most of this week spent at the Meego conference in Dublin. This seemed to be a rather apps-developer centric conf, with not much of interest on the low-level side. There were a few useful talks/conversations, though. * Intel were giving away Atom-based netbooks to all attendees; that's a lot of developers who are going to be testing and optimising their apps for Atom devices rather than ARM... * qemu: looked at https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668799 ; we don't seem to be taking the right lock before we manipulate the graph of translation blocks. I have a fix which stops the reported segfault, but the code has a number of "XXX not thread safe" and "FIXME: not SMP safe" comments and generally doesn't seem to have a coherent locking design :-( * qemu: sent some minor patches upstream: + enable iwmmxt coprocessors in user mode + remove some unused functions from target-arm and target-sparc + fix a failure to build bug in a makefile * qemu: some review of a patch to fix semihosting SYS_GET_CMDLINE Plans - qemu consolidation - post-toolchain-review, sort out some milestones for this report Absences: (complete to end of 2010) Thu/Fri 25-26 Nov; Fri 17 Dec - Tue 4 Jan inclusive. (Dallas Linaro sprint 9-15 Jan.)

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Weekly status

by Richard Sandiford

== This week == Started looking at STT_GNU_IFUNC support in BFD. There were a couple of janitorial changes I needed to make in order to prepare elf32-arm.c for the main patch. I tested those separately and submitted them upstream: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2010-11/msg00330.html http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2010-11/msg00331.html I've now finished a prototype implementation of the STT_GNU_IFUNC support itself. It wasn't as mechanical as I'd originally assumed, which was nice. Tests that I've run by hand seem to be doing the right thing. I've now started writing tests for the testsuite (meaning: I've completed 1 test so far). == Next week == * Add more tests, including Thumb coverage. * Start on the libc changes. Richard

15 years

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gcc seg fault on kernel build

by Rob Herring

Doing an allmodconfig build on the kernel, I get the following: CC arch/arm/kernel/asm-offsets.s In file included from /home/rob/proj/git/linux-2.6-dt/include/linux/kernel.h:12, from /home/rob/proj/git/linux-2.6-dt/include/linux/sched.h:54, from /home/rob/proj/git/linux-2.6-dt/arch/arm/kernel/asm-offsets.c:13: /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabi/4.4.5/include/stdarg.h:40: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault It occurs on Maverick 4.4, 4.5 and CodeSourcery 2009Q1 cross toolchains. It's confirmed by Codesourcery here: http://www.codesourcery.com/archives/arm-gnu/msg03719.html What's the status on this issue? I didn't see anything in Linaro gcc bugs that looks related. Rob

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] November 14-18

by Ira Rosen

Hi, This week I continued looking into vld/vst support in GCC. I also fixed GCC PR 46312 - testsuite failures on ARM. Ira

15 years

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STT_GNU_IFUNC and R_ARM_IRELATIVE

by Richard Sandiford

The STT_GNU_IFUNC blueprint: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Specs/Binutils-STT_GNU_IFUNC says "the ARM EABI will be updated to support STT_GNU_IFUNC's requirements". I suppose the most obvious thing that needs to be defined is the relocation number for R_ARM_IRELATIVE. What's the best way of handling that? The main options seem to be: 1. Reserve a relocation number with ARM first (129?). 2. Go ahead and implement it without having the EABI updated. See whether the results are good before deciding whether to bless it in the EABI. 3. Since STT_GNU_IFUNC is a GNU-specific, treat R_ARM_IRELATIVE as GNU-specific too, and pinch one of the R_ARM_PRIVATE relocs. I'm pretty sure (3)'s not the way to go, but I was aiming for completeness. :-) Richard

15 years

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Fwd: Fw: GCC SVN vs. BZR/LP

by Ira Rosen

Hi, On 17 November 2010 05:35, Michael Hope <michael.hope(a)linaro.org> wrote: > 1. How easy is it to frequently merge in SVN? It used to be terrible > as you had to manually track the merges. These days can you do a 'svn > merge trunk' and have it just work? I asked Mike Meissner to answer this question. Mike is very experienced in GCC and GCC SVN branch management. I am attaching his reply. Ira I sent this recently to ppc64-toolchain(a)linux.ibm.com on how to use svnmerge to manage branches: This script (also ~meissner/meissner/bin.sh/svnmerge) is what I use to update svn directories, such as ibm-gcc-4_5-branch. I think I originally got it from Ben E. and it may be in the contrib directory. Typically the way I start a branch, such as my normal power7-meissner branch, I do the following: $ export TRUNK="svn+ssh://@gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk" $ export BNAME="power7-meissner" $ export BRANCH="svn+ssh://@gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/branches/ibm/$BNAME" $ export SRC="$HOME/fsf-src" $ svn delete -m"delete old branch" $BRANCH $ svn copy -m"Clone new branch" $TRUNK $BRANCH $ cd $SRC $ svn co $BRANCH $ cd $BNAME $ svnmerge init $ svn update # this is sometimes needed $ svn commit -m'Create svnmerge init info' $ export REV="xxxx" # substitute subversion id for xxxxx $ echo "power7-meissner branch, based on $REV." > gcc/REVISION $ touch gcc/ChangeLog.power7 $ <edit gcc/ChangeLog.power to create initial contents> $ svn add gcc/ChangeLog.power gcc/REVISION $ svn commit -m'Add REVISION to branch' In particular, creating GCC/REVISION allows you to tell what subversion revision the source is based against. You can find the information via: $ svn propget svnmerge-integrated but it is a lot easier if you have a compiler tree to do gcc -v. After you do a propget, you will need to do a svn update. In this case, I use gcc/ChangeLog.power7 to hold the ChangeLog entries local to the branch. That way I can see a summary of the changes, but not pollute the normal ChangeLog files. To do merges, you need to make sure that all local changes are checked into the branch. Then do: $ cd $SRC/$BNAME $ svnmerge merge $ <edit gcc/REVISION and ChangeLog.power7 to indicate merge> $ <test merged files, if satisified, check them in> $ export REV="xxxx" # substitute subversion id for xxxxx $ svn update # just in case $ svn commit -m"Update to subversion id $REV" Now, to create a patch file do, make sure the files are checked in: $ cd $SRC/$BNAME $ export PATCHFILE="$HOME/patches/mypatch.patch01" $ <make ChangeLog entries in $PATCHFILE> $ svn diff --old $TRUNK --new . -r $REV >> $PATCHFILE $ <delete ChangeLog.power7, REVISION, property changes from $PATCHFILE> $ submit patch To see if there are changes to be merge in: $ svnmerge avail For example on the ibm-gcc-4_5-branch, the following changes are available to be merged in: 164657-166510 when I originally wrote this message on the 9th of November, and Peter has subsequently updated the merge. I put the folliwng in ~/.subversion/config to provide my own diff command: ### Set diff-cmd to the absolute path of your 'diff' program. ### This will override the compile-time default, which is to use ### Subversion's internal diff implementation. diff-cmd = /home/meissner/bin.sh/svndiff Every so often, I find svnmerge misses, for example in deleting directories. It is helpful to do a diff from the mainline every so often to make sure you are not missing newly created files or still are keeping older files or just missed a change. I'll include svndiff for the smarter svndiff command and mrm-changelog.el that looks for the ChangeLog.<name> files I use in different branches. Feel free to contact me to clarify some stuff. -- Michael Meissner, IBM 5 Technology Place Drive, M/S 2757, Westford, MA 01886-3141, USA meissner(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com fax +1 (978) 399-6899 (See attached file: svnmerge)(See attached file: svndiff)(See attached file: mrm-changelog.el)

15 years

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Public plan review recording

by Michael Hope

Hi there, There's a recording of this mornings public plan review available on the wiki at: https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105/PublicPlanReview Also included is a copy of the slides and supporting documents. Might be interesting for those who missed it. -- Michael

15 years

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Thumb-2 performance discussion

by Michael Hope

A heads up. I'd like to have a brainstorming session on potential Thumb-2 performance improvements in GCC. Think about what you'd like in such a session, and what preperation should be done, and we can discuss the discussion (heh) on Monday. -- Michael

15 years

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Abstract submissions for QEMU Users Forum (March 18th)

by Christian Robottom Reis

Hi there, I noticed that there's a QEMU users forum at: http://adt.cs.upb.de/quf/ and that the abstract submission phase is still open, and closes November 28th. It would be great to see some participation there and help identify other key people interested in using and improving QEMU. -- Christian Robottom Reis | [+55] 16 9112 6430 | http://launchpad.net/~kiko Linaro Engineering VP | [ +1] 612 216 4935 | http://async.com.br/~kiko

15 years

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[ACTIVITY] Digest for 2010-11-16

by Michael Hope

Zach Welch -- == Last Week == * Continued working on libunwind support. Trying to figure out why my signal frame detection doesn't work as expected. * Kept pace with the ltrace tree, testing recent patches on ARM. == This Week == * Continue to work on libunwind signal frame detection. Julian Brown -- == Linaro GCC == * Looked at issues #663198 (double-precision register expected) -- which was already fixed on the linaro branch, but the bug was reported against a version just prior to that, and #667490 -- which involved a possible problem with the NEON "load 0.0" patch. Experimented for a while with the latter, but could not find anything wrong. Followed up upstream, and requested a stand-alone test case. * Worked on a proper solution to the VMOVN-in-big-endian-mode problem, discovering that several other quadword-register operations were similarly broken in the process. WIP patch sent to linaro-toolchain for discussion, but it needs a little more work before it can be applied. Peter Maydell -- Progress: * qemu: more cleanup of signal handler VFP patchset; I think I just need to add iwmmx support and it's good * qemu: VCVT: found yet another bug, did final patchset cleanup: submitted to upstream list [8 patch series] * qemu: submitted a trivial patch to fix a problem where __get_user/_put_user macros had an unnecessary local var which could clash with a var being used by the macro user * set up a tree on git.linaro.org which we can use for a branch to make pull requests for ARM qemu fixes * did a rough estimate of time to do an Eagle qemu model (6 months + testing/bug fixing time) Issues: * lost some time to a problem where Linux VMs stopped being able to talk to the LDAP server; however I have a workaround and IT are investigating Meetings: * toolchain, toolchain standup, pdsw-tools, PD doughnuts Plans - attend Meego conference in Dublin (Nov 15-18 inc travel) http://conference2010.meego.com/ - start on qemu consolidation by upstreaming various ARMv7 correctness fixes Andrew Stubbs -- == GCC 4.5 == * Continued working on LP:663939. * I still have not worked out how best to fix the constant propagation problem that has been thwarting my optimization patch, however I think I understand it better now. * I have started on adding replicated pattern support to the constant splitting. Initial results were good, but I discovered that I had to rearrange the code somewhat to get the cost estimation and negative/inverted constant support working correctly. So far, I have it successfully using 16-bit replication pattern constants for set/add/subtract operations. Other operations appear broken at the moment, but it's almost certainly just a few tweaks required. * TODO: Add support for 32-bit replicated pattern constants. Adjust some of the other two-instruction constant generation techniques to let them fall through to this new code, where it would be beneficial. * Pushed the latest set of GCC patches into Linaro GCC 4.5. Chung-Lin Tang -- == Linaro GCC == * Linaro #672833, one batch of my backports of Bernd's postreload patches exposed some varargs regressions for x86-64, was reverted by Michael. Tested the compiler and found it was fixed on mainline rev.162384. Backporting this revision plus the postreload patches fixed the regressions; x86-64 bootstrap also verified okay. There is however another PR45027 fix that was needed on trunk, but needs a bit more clarification if needed on a 4.5 compiler. * Linaro #641397, CS issue #6753: bitfield optimization. Patch tested without regressions, posted for CS internal review, should soon push for Linaro merge. * Started looking further at some GCC DF, IRA internals. == This week == * Look at more Linaro issues. * Maybe start looking at some GCC bugzilla PRs. * There is a local ARM technical event in Hsinchu on Thursday, might go and look around. Yao Qi -- == Linaro GCC == * Mainline patch backport to Linaro 4.5. ** Patch "Fix an if statement in arm_rtx_costs_1". Verified on Linaro 4.5. 0.1% smaller on size, and 0.2% faster on speed. Merged to Linaro 4.5 by Andrew S. ** Try Nathan F's ifcvt-cond-move patch on cortex-a8 with -O2/O3. No improvements on speed/size for EEMBC. ** Bernd's ldm/stm patch. Analyze the reason of regression on Linaro 4.5. Found something wrong in IRA rtl dump, and spend sometime on understanding IRA rtl dump log. Thanks to Chung-Lin, I realize that IRA dump is correct, and look back to ARM RTL patterns on ldm/stm. Compared RTL patterns in 4.5 and 4.6, found some difference. Regenerate ldmstm.md for Linaro 4.5 after update arm-ldmstm.ml a little bit. Regressions goes away! No speed improvement, but code is smaller by 0.2% in EEMBC. Still prefer to merge to Linaro 4.5. ocaml is an interesting language, but not easy to learn and read in vim. * Some discussion on Linaro development process. * My regrename improvement patch (re. LP:633243). Communicate with Eric Botcazou back and forth, but current patch is still too target-dependent to him, as a Middle-End maintainer. Still need some improvements. * Build FSF GCC trunk. CLoog requirement in configure is wrong, revert configure to previous version, and then pass the version checking during gcc configure.

15 years

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Activity reports

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Could everyone in the toolchain working group start sending their activity reports to this list please? Put [ACTIVITY] at the start of the subject line so that they can be filtered. Ta, -- Michael

15 years

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Status reports

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Attached are the status reports from the Toolchain WG members for last week. -- Michael Ken Werner -- Hi Michael, * got access to the internal wiki/calendar/email :) * continued to setup the borrowed vexpress board * upgraded to the Linaro 10.11 release * encountered various issues until I found that the /etc/hosts is empty (#674090) * learned that the SD card issue is a known problem (#632798) * the network interface sometimes dies if stressed (Matt was able to reproduce this) * the disabled CONFIG_SWAP is being tracked as #672656 * sometimes the entire system hangs (when under heavy load?) * David noticed that /proc/cpuinfo lacks neon support (but his string benchmark/testcase ran fine) * wondering why the kernel reports only about 800 BogoMIPS while it's around 2k on the panda board * started to work on the atomic memory operations item * identified the relevant GCC patches * still looking for a good way to verify the GCC support * posted a patch on the glibc-ports ml with regard to #643171 David A Gilbert -- I managed to get to try Ken Werner's Versatile Express board with an A9MP tile; the shape of the graphs matches that from the Panda, but the raw performance is down by a factor of about 3 - I'm guessing it's clocked lower for some reason. It confirms however that the Neon behaviour I was seeing with memset is not Panda/OMAP4 specific; no one has replied to my post to linaro-toolchain. It's a difficult situation in that my fastest memset on Beagle is with Neon, and my fastest on v9 is without Neon - what would you select on? I've just finished writing memchr tests and my first crack at a faster version; I realised I could use the same trick that I had used for strlen and it works nicely - it seems to be about 50% faster than the libc version; I've not tested against any other versions yet. Paul Mckenney hasn't replied yet about the OSSC stuff, but apparently he's out travelling and back next week; so I'll catch him then. I tried preloading my faster memset into ghostscript, but found it was blatantly ignoring it - I think the memset is being called from somewhere inside libc; I managed to get xdeb to cross build me a libc but haven't yet got my changes into it. My order for a USB hard drive for my beagle seems to have been delayed by the supplier; I'm pushing this but it's starting to be a bit of a pain. Richard Sandiford -- == Last Week == * Pinged my GAS fix for Thumb PLT branches to locally-defined symbols. Committed it to binutils trunk and 2.21 branch after approval. This fixes the libgcc.so build failure that I was seeing with GOLD. * Worked on a patch to fix GOLD's handling of non-function references to weak undefined symbols. This ended up touching every backend (i386, x86_64, ARM, Power and SPARC) and was quite invasive, so it took a while in the end. Committed to binutils trunk after approval. * Ran more tests, both with -marm and -mthumb. I'm getting identical GCC test results (including gfortran and objc) for GOLD and BFD ld, so I think we're at the stage where GOLD is a viable replacement for the BFD linker. == Next Week == * I'll start looking at the IFUNC support. * I'll take another look at launchpad bug 665598. Peter Maydell -- Progress: * qemu: more cleanup of signal handler VFP patchset; I think I just need to add iwmmx support and it's good * qemu: VCVT: found yet another bug, did final patchset cleanup: submitted to upstream list [8 patch series] * qemu: submitted a trivial patch to fix a problem where __get_user/_put_user macros had an unnecessary local var which could clash with a var being used by the macro user * set up a tree on git.linaro.org which we can use for a branch to make pull requests for ARM qemu fixes * did a rough estimate of time to do an Eagle qemu model (6 months + testing/bug fixing time) Issues: * lost some time to a problem where Linux VMs stopped being able to talk to the LDAP server; however I have a workaround and IT are investigating Meetings: * toolchain, toolchain standup, pdsw-tools, PD doughnuts Plans - attend Meego conference in Dublin (Nov 15-18 inc travel) http://conference2010.meego.com/ - start on qemu consolidation by upstreaming various ARMv7 correctness fixes Ira Rosen -- Here is this week report: 1. BeagleBoard installed, now "playing" with it 2. Continued to work on auto-detection of vector size 3. Looked into mixed vector sizes 4. Learning about vld and vst instructions It looks like I won't be able to participate in Wed calls, since I am alone with the kids on Wednesday evenings.

15 years

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Assembler bug blocking Thumb-2 kernel builds

by Dave Martin

Hi all, I've hit a probable assembler bug trying to build a Thumb-2 kernel: Trying to assemble the attached file, I get: arch/arm/kernel/relocate_kernel.S: Assembler messages: arch/arm/kernel/relocate_kernel.S:10: Error: invalid offset, value too big (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC) arch/arm/kernel/relocate_kernel.S:11: Error: invalid offset, value too big (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC) arch/arm/kernel/relocate_kernel.S:58: Error: invalid offset, value too big (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC) arch/arm/kernel/relocate_kernel.S:59: Error: invalid offset, value too big (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC) The code appears correct and resonable, except that there should be a .align directive before the data words at the end of the file (but adding this doesn't fix the error) Assembling in ARM (i.e., without -mthumb), or deleting the .globl lines associated with the affected target symbols, the problem goes away. I believe this may be already by tracked by CodeSourcery as is issue #8775 (?) Has anyone hit this issue before? Is it fixed upstream? Any help much appreciated. Cheers ---Dave

15 years

3
6
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A9 Neon confusion

by David Gilbert

Hi, I've been looking at some basic libc routine optimisation and have a curious problem with memset and wondered if anyone can offer some insights. Some graphs and links to code are on https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Benchmarks/InitialMemset I've written a simple memset in both a with and without Neon variety and tested them on a Beagle(C4) and a Panda board and I'm finding that the Neon version is faster than the non-neon version (a bit) on the Beagle but a LOT slower on the Panda - and I'd like to understand why it's slower than the non-neon version - I'm guessing it's some form of cache interaction. The graphs on that page are all generated by timing a loop that repeatedly memsets the same area of memory; the X axis is the size of the memset. Prior to the test loop the area is read into cache (I came to the conclusion the A8 didn't write allocate?). There are two variants of the graphs - absolute in MB/s on Y, and a relative set (below the absolute) that are relative to the performance of the libc routines. (The ones below those pairs are just older versions). if you look at the top left graph on that page you can see that on the Beagle (left) my Neon routine beats my Thumb routine a bit (both beating libc). If you look on the top right you see the Panda performance with my Thumb code being the fastest and generally following libc, but the Neon code (red line) topping out at about 2.5GB/s which is substantially below the peak of the libc and ARM code. The core loop of the Neon code (see the bzr link for the full thing) is: 4: subs r4,r4,#32 vst2.8 {d0,d1,d2,d3}, [ r3:256 ]! bne 4b while the core of the non-Neon version is: 4: subs r4,r4,#16 stmia r3!,{r1,r5,r6,r7} bne 4b I've also tried vst1 and vstm in the neon loop and it still won't match the non-Neon version. All suggestions welcome, plus I'd appreciate if anyone can suggest which particular limit it's hitting - does anyone have figures for the theoretical bus and L1 and L2 write bandwidths for a Panda (and Beagle) ? Thanks in advance, Dave

15 years

1
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Draft of next weeks public review

by Michael Hope

Hi there. I've uploaded a draft of the slides and notes for next weeks public review at: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~linaro-toolchain-wg/+junk/publicreview1105/fil… 'Toolchain Public Review 11.05.odp' is a set of slides I'll talk to. The first 15-20 minutes will go through these to describe our focus and goals and how they tie together the blueprints and priorities. The rest of the session will go through the current blueprints and priorities. See: Toolchain Blueprints (short).pdf for the summary version and: Toolchain Blueprints (long).pdf for the long version. The long version is interesting if you can't find a particular tool or technology. It may be small enough to be called out as a single work item. These are only a draft, but I realised I haven't shared the plans with the rest of the group very well and Monday's meeting won't be the best. I'm on holiday tomorrow but feel free to send me any comments, -- Michael

15 years

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Reviewing blueprints for the TSC

by Michael Hope

Hi there. I've been going through the blueprints in preparation for next weeks TSC review. The top level topics are good, and I'd like to have the rest of the engineering blueprints checked over and updated to match what we talked about at the summit. Ira, could you please create blueprints for the areas you plan to look into? Anything that will take longer than a month should have a blueprint. It's worth having a catch-all blueprint for anything left over. Please add these as a dependency to: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro/+spec/tr-toolchain-neon-performance Zach, could you check: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-misc/+spec/ltrace-support https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro/+spec/tr-toolchain-openocd Peter, there's a whole range of QEMU ones that could do with a pass over. For more about the review, see: https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105/PublicPlanReview For a list of all of the toolchain blueprints, see: http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/blueprints#toolchain -- Michael

15 years

2
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Mixed vector sizes

by Ira Rosen

Hi, I started to look into mixed vector sizes (in the same loop). My main reason for this was to allow widening and narrowing instructions, that have different vector sizes for src and dest, to work properly. My example was widen_mult (int = short * short), I thought its implementation was not optimal. But now that I have a working GCC mainline for ARM, I see that it works just fine. short ub[], uc[]; int c[]; for (i = 0; i < n; i++) c[i] = ub[i] * ua[i]; is compiled as: .L11: add r1, r1, #1 vldmia r4!, {d18-d19} cmp r5, r1 vldmia ip!, {d16-d17} vmull.s16 q10, d18, d16 vstr d20, [r3, #-32] vstr d21, [r3, #-24] vmull.s16 q8, d19, d17 vstr d16, [r3, #-16] vstr d17, [r3, #-8] add r3, r3, #32 bhi .L11 which looks good to me at least from the vmull point of view. Does anyone have an example when mixed vector size instructions are not used properly? Another reason for mixed sizes could be cases where only part of the loop can be vectorized with the wider vectors. I don't know how common this is. Are there any other reasons to implement mixed vector sizes? I understand that this can be a useful feature, I am just not sure it's the most important one. Thanks, Ira

15 years

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Backport criteria

by Michael Hope

I've been going through the ChangeLog for the release and am having trouble justifying some of the changes brought in. In particular: * -fstrict-volatile-bitfields, which is more appropriate for bare metal/kernel code * Cortex-M4 support * C locale support in libstdc++-v3 The march/mcpu clean up is OK but marginal. Our focus is time based performance on the Cortex-A series with an implied applications over kernel/bare metal. This is a very narrow view, but every non-performance line of code we bring in can also bring in a bug. Any thoughts? For those who are looking at using our toolchain, is earlier access to other toolchain improvements interesting? -- Michael

15 years

4
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Upstream GCC feature freeze

by Andrew Stubbs

Hi all, As you may or may not know, upstream GCC has now entered 'stage 3' of it's development cycle. This will last until spring. This means that they are only accepting bug fixes and documentation improvements. New features and any performance improvements must wait until GCC 4.6 branches, prior to release, and GCC 4.7 development opens. During this process, our usual preferred work flow (upstream first) will not work, so we'll have to do something else. Here's my proposal: * Create a new Launchpad branch for GCC 4.6. * Synchronize this branch with upstream regularly * once per week, perhaps. * Try to get upstream approval for all new patches in the usual way * on the understanding that they won't be applied until stage 1 * bug fixes are unaffected and may commit as usual. * Commit all pending patches to our own 4.6 branch * and backport them to our 4.5, branch, of course. * Usual "no test regressions" policy applies to our own patches * but beware regressions from merges from upstream. * we may want to track the clean 4.6 test results for comparison This is little different to what we do with the 4.5 release branch now. Thoughts? Andrew

15 years

8
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Linaro GCC 4.5 2010-11 released

by Michael Hope

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the latest release of Linaro GCC 4.5. Linaro GCC 4.5 is the fourth release in the 4.5 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.1+svn164911, it includes many ARM-focused performance improvements and bug fixes. Interesting changes include: * Various NEON related fixes * Performance improvements * A clean up of some of the testsuite test cases * An updated version of the __sync multicore primitives * Improvements in data packing when optimising for size * C locale support in libstdc++-v3 This release adds the new option -fstrict-volatile-bitfields and enables it by default on ARM. See doc/invoke.texi for more information. The source tarball is available from: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.5-2010.11-0 Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro Note that there were no changes to the 4.4 series. -- Michael

15 years

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Linaro GDB 7.2 2010.11-0 released

by Michael Hope

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of Linaro GDB 7.2. Linaro GDB 7.2 2010.11-0 is the second release in the 7.2 series. Based off the latest GDB 7.2, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes and enhancements. This release concentrates on the GDB test suite and tidies up a number of failures. The source tarball is available at: https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/+milestone/7.2-2010.11-0 More information on Linaro GDB is available at: https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro -- Michael

15 years

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Auto-detection of vector size for NEON

by Ira Rosen

Hi, It looks like it's enough to implement targetm.vectorize. autovectorize_vector_sizes for NEON in order to enable initial auto-detection of vector size. With the attached patch and -mvectorize-with-neon-quad flag, the vectorizer first tries to vectorize for 128 bit, and if this fails, it tries to vectorize for 64 bit. For example, in the attached testcase number of iterations is too small for 128 bit (first 2 iterations have to be peeled in order to align the array accesses), but is sufficient for 64 bit (the accesses are aligned here). I'd appreciate your comments on the patch, and I also have a few questions: 1. Why the default vector size is 64? 2. Where is the place of NEON vectorization tests? I found NEON tests with intrinsics at gcc.target/arm, is that the right place? 3. According to gcc.dg/vect/vect.exp the only flag that is used for NEON (in addition to target independent flags) is -ffast-math. Is that enough? Thanks, Ira ChangeLog: * config/arm/arm.c (arm_autovectorize_vector_sizes): New function. (TARGET_VECTORIZE_AUTOVECTORIZE_VECTOR_SIZES): Define. Index: config/arm/arm.c =================================================================== --- config/arm/arm.c (revision 166032) +++ config/arm/arm.c (working copy) @@ -246,6 +246,7 @@ static bool arm_builtin_support_vector_misalignmen const_tree type, int misalignment, bool is_packed); +static unsigned int arm_autovectorize_vector_sizes (void); /* Table of machine attributes. */ @@ -391,6 +392,9 @@ static const struct default_options arm_option_opt #define TARGET_VECTOR_MODE_SUPPORTED_P arm_vector_mode_supported_p #undef TARGET_VECTORIZE_PREFERRED_SIMD_MODE #define TARGET_VECTORIZE_PREFERRED_SIMD_MODE arm_preferred_simd_mode +#undef TARGET_VECTORIZE_AUTOVECTORIZE_VECTOR_SIZES +#define TARGET_VECTORIZE_AUTOVECTORIZE_VECTOR_SIZES \ + arm_autovectorize_vector_sizes #undef TARGET_MACHINE_DEPENDENT_REORG #define TARGET_MACHINE_DEPENDENT_REORG arm_reorg @@ -23223,6 +23227,12 @@ arm_expand_sync (enum machine_mode mode, } } +static unsigned int +arm_autovectorize_vector_sizes (void) +{ + return TARGET_NEON_VECTORIZE_QUAD ? 16 | 8 : 0; +} + static bool arm_vector_alignment_reachable (const_tree type, bool is_packed) { test: #define N 5 unsigned int ub[N+2] = {1,1,6,39,12,18,14}; unsigned int uc[N+2] = {2,3,4,11,6,7,1}; void main1 () { int i; unsigned int udiff = 2; unsigned int umax = 10; for (i = 0; i < N; i++) { /* Summation. */ udiff += (ub[i+2] - uc[i]); /* Maximum. */ umax = umax < uc[i+2] ? uc[i+2] : umax; } }

15 years

3
5
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Weekly meeting at 0900 UTC today

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Just a reminder that today's call is the first at the new time of 0900 UTC which is 9am in the UK, 10am in Germany, 11am in Israel, and 5pm in China. I've updated the meetings page at: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings with the new details. -- Michael

15 years

1
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Help on merging two patches

by Yao Qi

Hi, I am backporint some patches from FSF mainline, which may improve Linaro 4.5 gcc on thumb2 speed. The first one is done by Richard E. "Improve optimization to transform TST into LSLS" http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-06/msg02518.html After it applied to Linaro 4.5 tree, EEMBC speed number downgrades, while code size is reduced to some extent. The code difference is like this, 6801 ldr r1, [r0, #0] f831 3013 ldrh.w r3, [r1, r3, lsl #1] -f413 6f00 tst.w r3, #2048 ; 0x800 -f43f af41 beq.w cc <t_run_test+0xcc> +0518 lsls r0, r3, #20 +f57f af44 bpl.w cc <t_run_test+0xcc> 4610 mov r0, r2 After reading cortex-a8 TRM, I can't find exact timing cycles of lsls. Under Chung-Lin's help, we feel that lsls should be slower than tst, but don't have any evidence to prove. If any people is familiar with arm microarch, help is welcome. If our assumption is correct, we may can change this patch to an optimization specific to size only. The second patch is Bernd's "Fix an if statement in arm_rtx_costs_1" http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg02096.html After this patch applied, EEMBC benchmark number is not changed. Shall we merge this patch to linaro 4.5 tree? I am inclined to merge it, but if you have concerns on this patch, let us discuss here. -- Yao Qi CodeSourcery yao(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x739

15 years

3
4
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Problems with BeagleBoard installation

by Ira Rosen

Hi, I am trying to install my new BeagleBoard xM. I started with https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/DailyBuilds, but it failed to write to the SD card giving some errors about QEMU (I can try that again if the error messages are important). Dave Martin also gave me this link https://wiki.linaro.org/Source/ImageInstallation, but it doesn't exist anymore. So, I tried these instructions: https://wiki.linaro.org/Source/VexpressImageInstallation with http://snapshots.linaro.org/10.11-daily/linaro-headless/20101107/0/images/t… http://jameswestby.net:8080/view/Hardware%20Packs/job/linaro-omap3%20hwpack… --dev beagle). The installation of the SD card went ok, but the board doesn't work. During boot I see the printings as in the attached file and it doesn't go any further. I hope someone can help me with that, because otherwise I am at dead end... Thanks, Ira

15 years

1
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Changing meetings

by Michael Hope

Hi there. I plan to change the Toolchain WG meetings due to daylight savings and to better cover the US. The Monday meeting will be at 0900 UTC which is 9 am in the UK, 10 am in central Europe, and 5 pm in Beijing. The standup calls will be merged into one at 1800 UTC on Wednesday which is 6 pm in the UK, 7 pm in central Europe, and 1 pm on the US East Coast. I don't expect China to call in as it's a quite unreasonable time. I'll update the invites and wiki page to reflect this. We'll start the new times next week, so Monday the 8th will be the first meeting at the new time. -- Michael

15 years

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Links

by Michael Hope

This is more for the people in the sprint... http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/blueprints#toolchain http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/planner -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

1
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Report of thumb2 tuning investigation

by Yao Qi

The gaol and plan of investigation has been described in [1] In the plan, this task is divided into three parts, 1) patch backport, 2) regression fix, and 3) exploration and study other ARM compilers. This report follow the same manner. 1. Patch backport. 8 patches are listed in [1]. Backport them to Linaro 4.5 tree will improve speed performance. Action/Recommendation: Backport them if speed improves. These patches are ones that I think they *should* improve speed, but "performance surprise" is not impossible. 2. Regression fix. So far (until r99399), Linaro GCC 4.5 is slower than FSF GCC 4.5.0 on some EEMBC benchmarks. Performance regression is introduced by four commits, r99324,r99330,r99369,r99380, see details in [2]. Action/Recommendation: Figure out why speed regression is introduced, and try to fix it. One cent here is that how to avoid speed regression. I do believe that sometimes regression is unavoidable, but it is better if can track them, and keep them manageable. 3. Exploration and study other ARM compilers. In this part, I don't find any possible thumb-2 specific improvements. However, loop optimization and instruction scheduling should be improved on ARM. (This statement may be true to all ports, or even all compilers) Some tickets are opened for this part, LP:660644 Missed optimization opportunities LP:662692 Inner loop in autcor00 can be optimized better LP:656957 LP:645267 Improve code generation on switch statement LP:663793 Tune Swing Modulo Scheduling or Selective Scheduling for ARM LP:656373 Try -fsched-pressure for ARM I have to admit that instruction scheduling is quite hard, but if we can do something here, that will be great. I've put it in "performance-insdie-gcc" session on UDS. Let us talk about it a little there next week. During this investigation, I also find LTO or "whole-program optimization" is useful to some EEMBC benchmarks. (I didn't run LTO/WPO at all, but I got this when read source of benchmarks) [1] Plan of CS304: Thumb2 tuning investigation. http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-toolchain/2010-October/000300.html [2] https://wiki.linaro.org/YaoQi/Sandbox/Thumb2SpeedOptimization -- Yao Qi CodeSourcery yao(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x739

15 years, 1 month

1
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finding in 4.5.2 20101003 (Linaro) [release 4.5-2010.10-0]

by leonid.moiseichuk＠nokia.com

Hello, Sorry I cannot find a bugzilla. One issue detected during compilation of ffmpeg, it looks like gcc -DHAVE_AV_CONFIG_H -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -I. -I"/home/ldm/misc/tc/suite/cases/ffmpeg/ffmpeg" -O3 -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112 -std=c99 -fomit-frame-pointer -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wall -Wno-switch -Wdisabled-optimization -Wpointer-arith -Wredundant-decls -Wno-pointer-sign -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wtype-limits -Wundef -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros -c -o libavcodec/dsputil.o libavcodec/dsputil.c /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s: Assembler messages: /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s:34764: Error: VFP/Neon double precision register expected -- `vmovl.s16 q3,s12' /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s:34781: Error: VFP/Neon double precision register expected -- `vmovl.s16 q2,s8' /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s:34798: Error: VFP/Neon double precision register expected -- `vmovl.s16 q1,s4' /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s:34800: Error: VFP/Neon double precision register expected -- `vmovl.s16 q0,s0' /tmp/ccK6jdSP.s:34820: Error: VFP/Neon double precision register expected -- `vmovl.s16 q8,s8' The sources, assembler and test case are attached. With best wishes, Leonid

15 years, 1 month

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2010-10-18 Toolchain WG minutes

by Michael Hope

Minutes from the 2010-10-18 call are here: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-10-18 I'm afraid I lost the recording of this call so the minutes are incomplete Minutes from the 2010-10-20 standup call are here: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-10-18 The calls focused on the upcoming summit. -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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Linaro@UDS sessions

by Michael Hope

Hi there. I've updated the list of potential Summit sessions based on yesterdays call. Could people please check the Sessions table on https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-10-18 and flesh out the agenda for sessions that have your name against them. The agenda should be five to ten discussion points, preferably of things that are not well understood and could use input from the group. There's a good discussion on what to expect at a Summit here: http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2010/10/q-the-ubuntu-developer-summits.html You can check the already-approved sessions here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-n/ Feel free to join in to any other sessions you might find interesting. There will be quite a few people with diverse backgrounds there, including ~80 people from Linaro, ~400 from Ubuntu, ~200 from the community, and ~200 remote. The overlap between Toolchain and Ubuntu interests might not be great, so I'll make sure a common work room is available for idle time. -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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Flavoured toolchains anyone?

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Some of Linaro developers works with ARM devices older then ARMv7-a architecture. Other people experiments with hard-float ABI. Each of them has to rebuild toolchain for own use and that means playing with components to have them build properly. But it is no more - I made some patches and armel-cross-toolchain-base since 1.53 version + newer source packages for gcc-4.[45]-armel-cross have support for "debian/flavour" file which allows to set some flags related to toolchain build. So far supported things are: - ARM architecture - float ABI - FPU mode - Thumb mode This feature is not merged into regular Ubuntu packages yet as this is work in progress which needs to be cleaned first. http://people.linaro.org/~hrw/armel-cross-toolchain/ has all source packages needed. Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

15 years, 1 month

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Flavoured toolchains anyone?

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Some of Linaro developers works with ARM devices older then ARMv7-a architecture. Other people experiments with hard-float ABI. Each of them has to rebuild toolchain for own use and that means playing with components to have them build properly. But it is no more - I made some patches and armel-cross-toolchain-base since 1.53 version + newer source packages for gcc-4.[45]-armel-cross have support for "debian/flavour" file which allows to set some flags related to toolchain build. So far supported things are: - ARM architecture - float ABI - FPU mode - Thumb mode This feature is not merged into regular Ubuntu packages yet as this is work in progress which needs to be cleaned first. http://people.linaro.org/~hrw/armel-cross-toolchain/ has all source packages needed. Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

15 years, 1 month

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NEON vectorization: use of specialized load/store instructions

by Julian Brown

I meant to send this to the "external" Linaro toolchain mailing list, not the internal CS one. Apologies to those who receive it twice! In a follow-up message, Joseph Myers pointed out a post he'd written previously on the same subject: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-06/msg00409.html In further followups (at the risk of misrepresenting Joseph & Paul Brook's opinions!), there seemed to be general agreement that a scheme something like that outlined below, with "permuting" loads/stores and some way of handling multiple in-register layouts for vectors seems like it will be a necessary addition to the vectorizer, going forward. Julian Begin forwarded message: Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 16:45:17 +0100 From: Julian Brown <julian(a)codesourcery.com> To: Ira Rosen <IRAR(a)il.ibm.com> Cc: Tejas Belagod <Tejas.Belagod(a)arm.com>, Linaro List <gnu-linaro-tools(a)codesourcery.com> Subject: [gnu-linaro-tools] NEON vectorization: use of specialized load/store instructions Hi, We're having some system issues, so I thought I'd take the chance to write down some things I've been thinking about re: utilising the NEON load/store instructions more effectively. I've also attempted to summarize the problems with big-endian mode. All unverified as of yet, so please take with a pinch of salt :-). Comments appreciated. It's been a while since I last thought about some of this stuff... Cheers, Julian Use of specialized load instructions ==================================== To provide good support for NEON's element and structure load/store instructions, GCC lacks support for a couple of key features: 1. A good way of representing a set of two, three or four vector registers (either D- or Q-sized), possibly with non-unit stride. 2. A generalised mapping between memory locations and lane numbers. To start with point 1: currently the element and structure load/store instructions are only supported via intrinsics. These are specified to load and store as if going via an array embedded in a union, i.e.: typedef struct int8x8x2_t { int8x8_t val[2]; } int8x8x2_t; __extension__ static __inline int8x8x2_t __attribute__ ((__always_inline__)) vld2_s8 (const int8_t * __a) { union { int8x8x2_t __i; __builtin_neon_ti __o; } __rv; __rv.__o = __builtin_neon_vld2v8qi ((const __builtin_neon_qi *) __a); return __rv.__i; } Even for a trivial test program, e.g.: #include <arm_neon.h> int foo (int8_t *x) { int8x8x2_t result = vld2_s8 (x); return vget_lane_s8 (result.val[0], 1); } We will generate code like so: sub sp, sp, #32 vld2.8 {d16-d17}, [r0] mov r3, sp vstmia sp, {d16-d17} add ip, sp, #16 ldmia r3, {r0, r1, r2, r3} stmia ip, {r0, r1, r2, r3} fldd d16, [sp, #16] vmov.s8 r0, d16[1] add sp, sp, #32 bx lr I.e., rather than being used directly, the registers loaded by vld2 will always be spilled to the stack then reloaded. This obviously reduces the usefulness of these intrinsics by a large factor. With some planning, it'd be good to find a powerful enough solution to this problem so that the same representation for multiple registers can be used by the autovectorizer as well as the intrinsic-handling code. (One difficulty is that the "foo.val[X]" interface should still be available to user code. There's probably no need for "val" to literally be an array, though other representations would require front-end changes). Assuming it's hard for the register allocator to deal with highly-constrained situations like requiring four consecutive registers, one (ugly) possibility might be to run a pass before register allocation, looking for "big" multi-register vectors and pre-allocating them to hard registers. Even using a fixed allocation of a single set of registers (e.g. make it so that all multi-reg loads/stores larger than a Q register must use d0-d7, or whatever) would probably give better code than what we produce at present, in most cases. Now, point 2. To start with, an aside: AIUI, there is currently an assumption in the vectoriser code that increasing element numbers in vector registers correspond to increasing addresses when those registers are loaded from and stored to memory (as if the vector was a short array, or alternatively as if a union of the vector register and an array of element-types had the same numberings for lanes and array indices corresponding to the same elements). Unfortunately that is only true for NEON in little-endian mode: in big-endian mode, the story is more complicated, for reasons I will try to explain. To remain compliant with the soft-float variant of the ARM EABI, we must pass vector register arguments in ARM registers (or the stack), not vector registers. This means that we must be very careful with the ordering of elements for values passed to functions. Consider the trivial function: int __attribute__((noinline)) qux (int16x8_t x) { x = vaddq_s16 (x, x); return vgetq_lane_s16 (x, 1); } This is compiled by GCC to the following (slightly unimpressively): vmov d18, r1, r0 @ v8hi vmov d19, r3, r2 vmov d20, r1, r0 @ v8hi vmov d21, r3, r2 vadd.i16 q8, q9, q10 vmov.s16 r0, d16[1] bx lr Which may then be called like, e.g.: ldmia sp, {r0-r3} blx qux So: notice that we're careful that when vector values are transferred from NEON registers to core registers, the same result will be transferred to/from memory when we use ldm/stm (core registers) or vldm/vstm (vector registers) -- i.e. we might use "vldm rX, {d18-d19}", storing d18 and d19 in consecutive increasing addresses, or "ldmia rX, {r0-r3}", again with consecutive registers in increasing memory locations, and we get the same outcome. The fact that we can use the multiple-register loads/stores is also important for spilling/reloading between vector and core registers, which inevitably happens occasionally. Notice also that when we call the above function like so: typedef union { int16x8_t quadvec; int16_t half[8]; } u; int foo (int8_t *x) { u bar; int i; for (i = 0; i < 8; i++) bar.half[i] = i; qux (bar.quadvec); } The value returned from "qux" is NOT 2 (1+1), as it would be if we were accessing the value at index 1 in the superimposed array in the union "u". The vgetq_lane_s16 call still interprets the array as if it had been loaded in little-endian element order. But we don't get the result we would have if the vector had been interpreted in purely big-endian order either (i.e. 12, 6+6)! In fact from the perspective of the element numbering used by vgetq_lane_s16, the vector elements we see for each of the (equal) operands of the "vadd" instruction in the qux function are: equiv. core register lane number (at function entry) value ----------- -------------------- ----- [0] high part of r1 3 [1] low part of r1 2 [2] high part of r0 1 [3] low part of r0 0 [4] high part of r3 7 [5] low part of r3 6 [6] high part of r2 5 [7] low part of r2 4 So the value returned will be 2+2, 4. Now, coming back to the vectorizer. Current practice means that increasing element numbers should correspond to increasing memory locations: i.e., that "array ordering" is in effect, just as in the call to vgetq_lane_s16 in the above example. This leads to an anomaly: it means that when the vectorizer asks for a particular element, it will generally get a different one. Most of the time we get away with this, since the vectorizer mostly deals with "opaque" vectors which are operated on element-wise: i.e. we only deal with data at the granularity of whole vectors, so it doesn't matter which order the elements are in. The ARM implementations of reduction operations fortuitously calculate the results across all elements simultaneously, so when one of those elements is extracted, we still get the right answer. One notable exception to this though is the movmisalign<mode> patterns: these are implemented using the vld1 and vst1 instructions, which load elements in "array" order (increasing elements from increasing memory locations), even in big-endian mode. Since vectors loaded using those instructions are "incompatible" with the above scheme, such misaligned accesses are simply disabled in big-endian mode. Of course, generally, sticking with the current non-solution in big-endian mode is not sustainable (and is probably already broken in various cases). So it might be worth thinking about whether supporting big-endian mode properly, as well as handling the more complex load and store element/structure instructions, can be done using some generalised solution. I'm thinking (without having much idea about how feasible such an idea is) of something along the lines of a function (in the mathematical sense) attached to each vector value manipulated by the vectorizer, to map that value's element numberings to and from memory offsets. So then the quad-word vector of 16-bit elements discussed above would look like, in big-endian mode: foo, {6, 4, 2, 0, 14, 12, 10, 8} Whereas in little-endian mode (or in big-endian mode, for vectors loaded using vld1), it would look like: foo, {0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14} And then, perhaps more interestingly, a vector loaded using e.g. a "multiple 3-element structures" load, vld3.16 {d1, d2, d3}, [rN] Might look like (in either endianness, assuming we can represent a vector of such size in our hypothetical scheme): foo, {0, 6, 12, 18, 2, 8, 14, 20, 4, 10, 16, 22} Though it's not clear that such a scheme would be powerful enough to represent the whole range of element/structure loads/stores available (you'd probably need to be able to specify skipped or don't-care elements to do that, at least).

15 years, 1 month

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Plan of CS304: Thumb2 tuning investigation

by Yao Qi

First of all, the goal of this work is about investigation on speed improvement on linaro gcc 4.5. Finally, the output/result of this work is to list all possible recommendations/actions to improve speed on linaro 4.5. Comments to this plan are welcome. So far, we can improve speed in three ways, 1. Backport patches from FSF GCC 4.6. Note that we don't want to backport the whole 4.6. 2. Benchmark with FSF GCC 4.5.0. Fix performance regressions if there are on linaro gcc 4.5. Output is the reason of performance regression, or even further, give recommendations on how to fix it. 3. Study the code generated by other ARM compilers, and give recommendations on how to improve GCC to do better job. I'll describe these three ways in details in the following sections, - Backport patches from FSF GCC 4.6 I went through gcc-patches archive, and select several patches that are helpful to code improvements. 1 ifcvt optimization. Target independent. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-04/msg00832.html 2 redundant register move for sign extending. Thumb2. http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=43137 3. PR 45335 Use ldrd and strd to access two consecutive words. Not yet approved. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-09/msg00059.html 4. Fix an if statement in arm_rtx_costs_1. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg02096.html 5. Reduce code duplication for Thumb2 move patterns http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg00624.html 6. ARM ldm/stm peepholes http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg00512.html 7. PR44999 Replace "and r0, r0, #255" with uxtb in thumb2 http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-07/msg01700.html 8. Improve optimization to transform TST into LSLS http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-06/msg02518.html 9. Fix bswap patterns for ARM / Thumb and Thumb2. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-01/msg01238.html - Fix speed regression I found speed regression on EEMBC on linaro 4.5, compared with FSF GCC 4.5.0, and I'll investigate why speed regression happens on these cases. Here is a table below about speed regression compared between FSF GCC 4.5.0 and Linaro GCC 4.5 (revno:99398) O2 O3 puwmod01, -5.5 -3.5 bitmnp01, -7.9 -0.7 routelookup, -6.4 -8.2 conven00data_1, -7.2 -5.8 conven00data_2, -8.1 -7.3 conven00data_3, -6.6 -5.5 viterb00data_1, -1.7 +5.9 viterb00data_2, -4.3 +2.6 viterb00data_3, -2.3 +1.8 viterb00data_4, -5.3 -0.3 - Study the code generated by other ARM compilers. In this part, I'll study the binary generated by other ARM compilers, and try to teach GCC smart enough to do the same thing. This piece of work is quite open, and hard to estimate how much output we could get. -- Yao Qi CodeSourcery yao(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x739

15 years, 1 month

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Gcc test suite failures

by Nicolas Pitre

People here might want to have a look at this bug: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bg.cgi?id=45979 Note that the heap randomization feature added to the kernel was part of a Linaro security blueprint. Nicolas

15 years, 1 month

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Linaro Toolchain 2010.10 release

by Michael Hope

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2010.10 consolidation release including Linaro GCC 4.4, Linaro GCC 4.5, and the first version of Linaro GDB 7.2. Linaro GDB 7.2 2010.10-0 is the first release in the 7.2 series. Based off the latest GDB 7.2, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes and enhancements. Interesting changes include: * Backtraces in Thumb-2 code are significantly improved * Much better prologue and epilogue parsing * Improved software watchpoint support * Many test suite tidy-ups Linaro GCC 4.5 is the third release in the 4.5 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.1+svn, it includes many ARM-focused performance improvements and bug fixes. Linaro GCC 4.4 is the fourth release in the 4.4 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.4.5, it fixes many of the issues found during building Ubuntu over the last few months. Interesting changes include: * Linaro GCC 4.4 is now based off FSF GCC 4.4.5 * Cortex A8 and Cortex A9 scheduler NEON improvements * Better code generation for constant addresses with inline assembly * Better code for copying small constant strings * Various correctness improvements Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC and GDB pages on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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DCC device driver and gdb server

by Øyvind Harboe

Hi all, I was wondering someone knows about a ARM DCC (debug communications channel) device driver. The idea is to run gdbserver on /dev/dcc such that application debugging does not hog a serial/ethernet port. I'd modify OpenOCD to forward the DCC onto a TCP/IP port to connect GDB to the gdbserver. -- Øyvind Harboe US toll free 1-866-980-3434 / International +47 51 63 25 00 http://www.zylin.com/zy1000.html ARM7 ARM9 ARM11 XScale Cortex JTAG debugger and flash programmer

15 years, 1 month

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New Linaro Toolchain meeting covering American timezones

by Michael Hope

(cc'ed to linaro-toolchain, bcc'ed to others who may be interested) I'm considering adding a new Linaro Toolchain meeting to cover people in the North/South American timezones. We've got quite a few people in that area who are interested in the toolchain but can't make the current 0900 UTC calls. How about a weekly half-hour call on Wednesdays at 1800 UTC? Once daylight savings drops out on the 7th of November, this would be 1000 Sacramento/PST, 1200 Houston/CST, and a reasonable evening time for those in Europe who wish to join. This will be a technical call and can cover topics such as status updates, release plans, reported problems, and any input from toolchain users. Please send me an email if you are interested, -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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System directories when cross-compiling

by Michael Hope

Hi Marcin. Would you consider passing --enable-poison-system-directories to the cross compiler configure? This makes the '-Wpoison-system-directories' option available which warns you if the cross compiler picks up a library or header file from /usr instead of the cross-build environment. I'm talking with someone who's looking at using the Linaro compiler and had a strange error due to picking up the host crtn.o. Having this warning would of tracked down the problem faster. -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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the linaro toolchain and older arm versions

by John Rigby

I believe that the libgcc.a in our toolchain contains Thumb-2 code. I verified this by doing objdump on libgcc.a and I see combinations of 16 and 32 bit instructions. So does that mean that the toolchain is only usable for ARM versions that support Thumb-2? Thanks, John

15 years, 1 month

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CS MinGW patches

by Andrew Stubbs

As discussed in the meeting yesterday, CodeSourcery has a few MinGW patches that I had not merged into Linaro GCC. I have now investigated these patches, and I'm fairly happy that most are not necessary for Linaro. They're mainly about interworking with Cygwin. The one exception is this one: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-04/msg01214.html (and even that is primarily a GDB issue). Andrew

15 years, 1 month

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2010-10-04 Toolchain WG minutes

by Michael Hope

...are available here: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-10-04 A recording of the call is available here: http://tc.seabright.co.nz/toolchainwg/ Interesting topics include a discussion on the copyright and license issues on string routines, the upcoming 2010.10 release, the lifecycle of Linaro GCC 4.4, potential Windows builds, and the blueprints for next cycle. -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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ltrace + thumb2

by Zach Welch

I made a patch for ltrace that adds support for Thumb-2. There's not much to it, but it allows me to trace applications built for Cortex-A8. Without it, users will experience this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ltrace/+bug/639796 Unfortunately, it appears that the upstream tree is not well-maintained. I posted it to the mailing list for the project, but others' patches have been ignored for many months. However, my post precipitated another contributor to offer to maintain the package. I also posted this patch as the proposed solution for the above LP bug, which should allow Linaro to benefit from the work without worrying about upstream. In fact, a new version of the package appears to have been released that includes my patch (0.5.3-2ubuntu6). Please give this updated package a whirl and let me know if there is more work to be done. Thoughts? Unless I hear feedback from others, I will assume that this tool now works for Cortex-A[89] and move on to other tasks. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

15 years, 1 month

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People wanting Cortex-A9 boards

by Michael Hope

(this is for current Toolchain WG members. Sorry if I got anyone else's hopes up) We'll soon be coming into some decent dual-core Cortex-A9 boards that have 1 GB of RAM and a good set of USB ports. I've asked for four of them with hard drives to go into the data centre for general use. Would anyone also like one for their desk? Note that you're generally better off using a data centre board as it's one less thing to maintain. -- Michael

15 years, 1 month

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Armel cross compilers for lucid

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Hi I finally built armel cross compiler packages for Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid' LTS. They are available in unsigned APT repository: deb http://people.canonical.com/~hrw/ubuntu-lucid-armel-cross-compilers/ ./ They are built from Maverick packages: - binutils-source - eglibc-source - gcc-4.4-source - gcc-4.5-source - linux-source-2.6.35 - armel-cross-toolchain-base - gcc-4.4-armel-cross - gcc-4.5-armel-cross So they do not give exactly same versions as compilers used in 10.04 - please remember about it while doing cross builds. Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

15 years, 1 month

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ffmpeg regression

by Michael Hope

Hi Julian. For your reference, the performance of ffmpeg on a certain h.264 video decode has regressed since 4.4.0. See: http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/benchcompare for the relative numbers. We're significantly better than 4.4.0 in the two other test videos, and better than 4.5.1 in all. The video itself is here: http://ex.seabright.co.nz/misc/cbuild/live/cbuild/files/ffmpeg/03-src13_hrc… ffmpeg is configured with -mfpu=vfp3 with the hand-written assembler backend turned off. The vfp3 is an accident - I forgot to explicitly set it to neon. You can see how to ffmpeg was configured here: http://ex.seabright.co.nz/misc/cbuild/live/cbuild/lib/ffmpegbench.mk The particular version is available here: http://ex.seabright.co.nz/misc/cbuild/live/cbuild/files/ffmpeg-0.6.tar.xz If you have time, please have a look at it. If not file a ticket on Launchpad and we'll look at it as part of the speed improvements. -- Michael

15 years, 2 months

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Host strip corrupts cross-built binaries

by Loïc Minier

Hi folks apparently some tool calls "strip" instead of "$triplet-strip" when cross-building; this is something we shall fix, but it is apparently corrupting the binaries in some cases: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/binutils/+bug/615765 It seems the ELF architecture isn't set properly, or so I'm told. Which component is to blame here? Are we looking at a binutils or a gcc bug for not being able to set or read enough data that the architecture mismatch isn't detected? What could we do about it? Thanks! -- Loïc Minier

15 years, 2 months

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2010-09-27 Toolchain WG Minutes

by Michael Hope

The minutes from the (short) 2010-09-27 Toolchain WG meeting are available here: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-09-27 A recording of the call is available here: http://tc.seabright.co.nz/toolchainwg/2010/09/2010-09-27-weekly-call/ Fairly quiet this week due to being in the middle of things. Discussions include the Toolcahin WG Versatile Express board status, upstream patch status, how to divide future work up with ARM, LTO, and benchmarks. -- Michael

15 years, 2 months

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Linaro Valgrind snapshot 20100927 released

by Peter Maydell

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the availability of a "developer preview" of Valgrind which includes the support for ARM and Thumb which has recently been added by the Valgrind developers. Our aim with this preview release is to advertise Valgrind's improved ARM support and encourage people to try it out and find bugs before the official 3.6.0 release. Please report bugs via upstream's BTS: http://valgrind.org/support/bug_reports.html or you can ask on linaro-toolchain(a)lists.linaro.org if you have any problems. This release is a snapshot of upstream subversion; it should generally work but you may encounter bugs, especially if you run it on hand-optimised assembly that uses obscure instructions. New (upstream) features in this snapshot include: * Greatly improved support for ARM * Support for the Thumb instruction set * Support for NEON and VFPv3 instructions Known issues: * callgrind has difficulty identifying ARM function call and return so may not produce useful results Downloads are available from the Linaro Overlay PPA: https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/overlay ...so if you're running Linaro on an ARM system you should be able to just install it with 'apt-get install valgrind'. -- Peter Maydell

15 years, 2 months

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Rough OpenOCD Plan

by Zach Welch

To All Ye Linaro Toolchain Folk, (and OpenOCD developers too) After a week of reading specifications and code, I am ready to start doing some serious hacking on OpenOCD. The following outlines my present plans and expectations, with the caveat that time can change everything. Last week, I started testing my BeagleBoard with OpenOCD, so I have begun trying to validate and improve the Cortex-A8 support. Indeed, I have already committed a minor patch that fixed a bug in the trunk caused by new command syntax required to distinguish physical memory addresses from virtual ones. That bug had been preventing the BeagleBoard support from working for several months, so this seems to show that nobody has been using (or even testing) the latest code with that board. It seems that much of the debug architecture can be shared between these two cores, so features added and bugs fixed for A8 should help me implement A9 faster. Indeed, A9 support may be more a matter of refactoring the existing code than developing new code. In this respect, the lists of tasks for A8 and A9 may end up proceeding in parallel. Cortex-A8: 1) Add missing topology detection for determining location of AHB-AP (for system memory access), APB-AP (for DAP and other CoreSight components), and register address range for accessing the DAP. 2) Fix Halt After Reset functionality (using vector catch magic). 3) Expose missing VFP3/NEON registers (only when present). 4) Fix various memory and resource leaks. Cortex-A9: 1) Basic bring-up to successful attachment with debugger. 2) Develop board scripts for common evaluation boards. 3) Work on advanced features: - download and run algorithms out of memory, - breakpoints/watchpoints, - tracing and performance monitoring, 4) Ensure SMP support works out-of-the-box. Finally, it would be good to produce a new release when all of these changes have made it into the tree. Due to various factors, the project has not achieved a regular release schedule, but these features would help to justify the effort from the community. P.S. I have cc'd the openocd-development list in the hope of generating useful feedback, but it requires subscribing to post (last I checked). Sorry for the bad netiquette. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

15 years, 2 months

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Linaro GDB release process

by Ulrich Weigand

Hello, I've now checked the Linaro branding changes in to the gdb-linaro Bazaar repository. I've created a Wiki page describing the Linaro GDB release process based on that repository: http://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/GDBReleaseProcess (modeled after Andrew's GCCReleaseProcess page) Review and comments are welcome! 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

15 years, 2 months

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NEON vectorization improvements - preliminary notes

by Julian Brown

Hi, In case this is useful in its current (unfinished!) form: here are some notes I made whilst looking at a couple of the items listed for CS308 here: https://wiki.linaro.org/Internal/Contractors/CodeSourcery Namely: * automatic vector size selection (it's currently selected by command line switch) * also consider ARMv6 SIMD vectors (see CS309) * mixed size vectors (using to most appropriate size in each case) * ensure that all gcc vectorizer pattern names are implemented in the machine description (those that can be). I've not even started on looking at: * loops with more than two basic blocks (caused by if statements (anything else?)) * use of specialized load instructions * Conversly, perhaps identify NEON capabilities not covered by GCC patterns, and add them to gcc (e.g. vld2/vld3/vld4 insns) * any other missed opportunities (identify common idioms and teach the compiler to deal with them) I'm not likely to have time to restart work on the vectorization study for at least a couple of days, because of other CodeSourcery work. But perhaps the attached will still be useful in the meantime. Do you (Ira) have access to the ARM ISA docs detailing the NEON instructions? Cheers, Julian

15 years, 2 months

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arm thumb veneer question

by John Rigby

While trying out the u-boot-next branch I found a problem. First some explanation. On most platforms, u-boot is linked to the address it will first start running. For example when using NOR flash U-Boot will be linked to an address in flash. Very early in the boot process, U-Boot copies itself to the top and ram and jumps there. This relocation has worked for years on powerpc and other arches. The -next tree adds this for arm and it almost works. The part that does not work is that some veneer routines do not get fixed up. Here is an example. A routine called i2c_init calls __aeabi_idiv. Here is the disassembly: ... 288: e59f0148 ldr r0, [pc, #328] ; 3d8 <i2c_init+0x1a4> 28c: e1a01083 lsl r1, r3, #1 290: ebfffffe bl 0 <__aeabi_idiv> 294: e2507006 subs r7, r0, #6 298: 4a000001 bmi 2a4 <i2c_init+0x70> Later after this .o is linked with everything else and libgcc that morphs to: 8000b384: e59f0148 ldr r0, [pc, #328] ; 8000b4d4 <_end+0xfff97c98> 8000b388: e1a01083 lsl r1, r3, #1 8000b38c: eb00aa43 bl 80035ca0 <____aeabi_idiv_veneer> 8000b390: e2507006 subs r7, r0, #6 8000b394: 4a000001 bmi 8000b3a0 <i2c_init+0x70> and the veneer version is at the end of text with other veneers: 80035ca0 <____aeabi_idiv_veneer>: 80035ca0: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035ca4 <_end+0xfffc2468> 80035ca4: 80035999 .word 0x80035999 80035ca8 <____aeabi_llsl_veneer>: 80035ca8: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035cac <_end+0xfffc2470> 80035cac: 80035c7d .word 0x80035c7d 80035cb0 <____aeabi_lasr_veneer>: 80035cb0: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035cb4 <_end+0xfffc2478> 80035cb4: 80035c61 .word 0x80035c61 80035cb8 <____aeabi_llsr_veneer>: 80035cb8: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035cbc <_end+0xfffc2480> 80035cbc: 80035c49 .word 0x80035c49 80035cc0 <____aeabi_uidivmod_veneer>: 80035cc0: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035cc4 <_end+0xfffc2488> 80035cc4: 8003597d .word 0x8003597d 80035cc8 <____aeabi_uidiv_veneer>: 80035cc8: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035ccc <_end+0xfffc2490> 80035ccc: 80035721 .word 0x80035721 80035cd0 <____aeabi_idivmod_veneer>: 80035cd0: e51ff004 ldr pc, [pc, #-4] ; 80035cd4 <_end+0xfffc2498> 80035cd4: 80035c2d .word 0x80035c2d then if we look at 80035998 we see some thumb code. 80035998 <__aeabi_idiv>: 80035998: 2900 cmp r1, #0 8003599a: f000 813e beq.w 80035c1a <.divsi3_nodiv0+0x27c> When u-boot copies itself to ram it relocates the jump tables it knows about and could relocate the addresses in the veneer routines if it knew about them. There are at least three possible ways to fix these: 1) u-boot has its own private libgcc and if I use it the problem goes away. 2) is there an option for the toolchain to use an arm libgcc instead of thumb? 3) is there a way to find the veneers at runtime and fix them up? All input welcome. Thanks, John

15 years, 2 months

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Branding for Linaro GDB package

by Ulrich Weigand

Hello Michael, I'm looking into "branding" changes needed for a Linaro GDB release. So far I've made the following changes: - Set default PKGVERSION to "Linaro GDB" instead of "GDB" - Set default BUGURL to "http://bugs.launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/" instead of "http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/" - Set version number according to Linaro version scheme - Update release script to generate tarballs/directories named "gdb-linaro-$VERSION" instead of "gdb-$VERSION". As a result, the default GDB startup output now reads: GNU gdb (Linaro GDB) 7.2-2010.10-0 Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i686-pc-linux-gnu". For bug reporting instructions, please see: <http://bugs.launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/>. Do you agree that this is the way we should go? Have I overlooked anything? Unless there are objections, I'm planning to check these changes in later this week. As a related question, the generated files in a standard GDB 7.2 release seem to have been built on a relatively old system (RHEL 4 ?), which is visible through the versions of tools like bison, flex, texinfo, and gettext used to build those files. When building our Linaro GDB release tarballs, should we: - just use the tools as installed on a recent build system (say, Ubuntu Lucid), or - attempt to rebuild the release with the exact same set of tools used for the GDB 7.2 release? The second option has the advantage of reducing the amount of changes, e.g. visible in a full diff of the release tarballs. However, it has the disadvantage that reconstructing those exact set of tools (including Red Hat patches, it seems) is somewhat difficult, and can in addition lead to somewhat outdated results ... 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

15 years, 2 months

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OpenOCD

by Zach Welch

Hi all, I was recently hired by CodeSourcery and have been assigned to Linaro for the purpose of improving OpenOCD. Specifically, I will be adding new support for Cortex-A9 SMP, though I may also make a few improvements to its handling of Cortex-A8 in the process. If you have experience using OpenOCD in these contexts, let me know if you have any specific requests for features or fixes, and I will try to fold them into my plans. After this cross-posted introduction, I believe that most of my correspondence will appear on the Toolchain mailing list, but I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that they can find me there. Cheers, -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

15 years, 2 months

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Linaro GCC 4.4 and 4.5 2010.09 released

by Michael Hope

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of both Linaro GCC 4.4 and Linaro GCC 4.5. Linaro GCC 4.4 is the third release in the 4.4 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.4.4, it pulls in the pre-4.4.5 changes made by the FSF over the last six months. Linaro GCC 4.5 is the second release in the 4.5 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.1, it finishes the merge of many ARM-focused performance improvements and bug fixes. Interesting changes include: * Improved performance on the Cortex-A9 * Backports of a range of performance improvements from mainline * New inline versions of the GCC builtin sync primitives Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro Also available is an early release of optimised string routines for the Cortex-A series, including a mix of NEON and Thumb-2 versions of memcpy(), memset(), strcpy(), strcmp(), and strlen(). For more information see: https://launchpad.net/cortex-strings Pre-build packages are available in the Linaro Toolchain PPA at: https://launchpad.net/~linaro-toolchain-dev/+archive/ppa -- Michael

15 years, 2 months

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Thumb2 code size improvements

by Yao Qi

Hi, We are looking for some possible improvements and optimizations on thumb2 code size. Currently, I am running some benchmarks with compilation flag "-Os -march=armv7-a -mthumb", and hope to find some thing interesting that we can improve. Beside that, do you have some ideas on this topic? or do you have some observations on thumb2 code that we may probably improve the size? Any thoughts on this are appreciated. Yao

15 years, 2 months

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State of cross compiler packages

by Marcin Juszkiewicz

I think that it is easier to describe situation in email then on irc. Currently there are 4 packages related to cross compilation support: - armel-cross-toolchain-base (a-c-t-base in short) - gcc-4.4-armel-cross - gcc-4.5-armel-cross - gcc-defaults-armel-cross Each of them got into archive but they need to be updated to get installable packages. Status of each package: 1. a-c-t-base is at 1.47 in archive and was built from gcc-4.5-source 4.5.1-6ubuntu1 version. This package is used to bootstrap armel cross toolchain and generates: - binutils-arm-linux-gnueabi (from binutils-source) - libc6(-dev,-dbg)-armel-cross (from eglibc-source) - linux-libc-dev-armel-cross (from linux-source-2.6.35) - gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base, libgcc1(-dbg)-armel-cross (from gcc-4.5-source) libgcc1* packages have /usr/share/doc/ directories as symlinks to /usr/share/doc/gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base/ I have a version which does not provide gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base package, libgcc(-dbg)-armel-cross depends on gcc-4.5-base and have /usr/share/doc/ directories pointing into gcc-4.5-base one. Need to fix this symlink by providing those files in libgcc1 package instead. 2. gcc-4.4-armel-cross is at 1.36 in archive and was built with gcc-4.4-source 4.4.4-14ubuntu4 version. This package provides compilers, libstc++6-4.4-(dev,dbg,pic)-armel-cross, libmudflap0-4.4-dev-armel-cross and gcc-4.4-arm-linux-gnueabi-base packages. I have 1.38 version ready to upload which fixes #637454 #640298 bugs. 3. gcc-4.5-armel-cross is at 1.35 in archive and was built with gcc-4.5-source 4.5.1-7ubuntu1 version. This package provides compilers and runtime libraries. But it does not provide libgcc1(-dbg)-armel-cross and gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base because they are in a-c-t-base source package. All resulting packages have /usr/share/doc/ directories pointing into gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base one which is policy violation. I have 1.37 version ready to upload which fixes #637454 #640298 bugs and provides gcc-4.5-arm-linux-gnueabi-base package so policy violation is removed. 4. gcc-defaults-armel-cross is at 1.3 in archive and does not require any changes. Main problem is that packages generated from gcc-4.5-source are split into two packages: armel-cross-toolchain-base (libgcc1(-dbg)-armel-cross) and gcc-4.5-armel-cross (all the rest). This was required to allow to bootstrap cross compiler but gives problems when one is built with other version of gcc-4.5-source then other - resulting packages are not installable (we have it now in archive). It is also a thing which Matthias does not like and I understand it. For now my only solution is to build both with one version of gcc-4.5-source. What are your opinions? http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/download/ubuntu/ is download link for mentioned versions. Regards, -- JID: hrw(a)jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz

15 years, 2 months

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Re: GCC PRE patch; apply or not?

by Steven Bosscher

xf. http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-toolchain/2010-August/000069.html > It is not upstreamable due to copyright issues, but we have a policy > that we can keep such patches, if we wish. I wrote this patch. If I am the copyright issue, then there is no issue. I have a copyright assignment for all my GCC work to the FSF. That assignment also covers the patch in the e-mail stored at http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-12/msg00199.html. I consider copyright to all my patches assigned to the FSF if I have submitted the patches to gcc-patches(a)gcc.gnu.org, or attached them to a Problem Report in GCC bugzilla, or both. The only reason why this patch for GIMPLE PRE is not in the FSF GCC already, is that I just never cared enough to pursue it. GCC is just a hobby for me, and experimenting with ideas is fun. Doing all the required testing for inclusion in the FSF GCC is not fun and it costs time that I usually can't find. I am just too busy with other things to clear off this and other pending patches/ideas from my TODO list :-) If you wish to submit this patch for the FSF GCC, please feel free to do so. In fact, I'd encourage you to do so. Likewise for my patch for e.g. http://gcc.gnu.org/PR20070, and for the GIMPLE hoisting pass. Ciao! Steven

15 years, 2 months

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binutils testsuite Thumb-2 coverage

by Chung-Lin Tang

Hi, about the status of binutils testsuite Thumb coverage (CS204 in the workplan), I have filed two Launchpad bugs: #640263: Testsuite coverage: Thumb-2 VFP/NEON encodings https://bugs.launchpad.net/binutils-linaro/+bug/640263 #640272: Testsuite coverage: Thumb relocations https://bugs.launchpad.net/binutils-linaro/+bug/640272 To summarize: I currently do not see any testing of Thumb-2 VFP/NEON encodings; Thumb mode relocations are also only barely tested in the ld testsuite. Also, please inform if there are any other areas of binutils Thumb testing that may be of concern to Linaro. Thanks, Chung-Lin

15 years, 2 months

2
1
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Thumb2 size optimization report

by Yao Qi

* Goal Goal of this work is to look for thumb2 code size improvements on FSF GCC trunk. * Methodology ** Build FSF GCC trunk w/ and wo/ hardfp, run benchmarks including eembc, spec2000, and dhrystone, and check asm code to see if there is any possible improvements on size. ** Get input and suggestion from ARM experts. ** Search open PRs in GCC bugzilla. * Results Each item has been tracked on launchpad, and is listed with some elements, ** Cause: cause of this problem is known or unknown ** Difficulty: estimation of implementation difficulty ** Recommendation: Yao's recommendation on that bug for next step 1. LP:633233 Push/pop low register rather than high register when keeping stack alignment As Richard E. pointed out, it was implemented in gcc-4.5 on 2009, but Yao still can see the usage of r8 on FSF GCC trunk. Cause: Might be a regression if problem disappears on gcc-4.5. Difficulty: Easy. might not hard to fix a regression. Recommendations: Fix this regression if it is. 2. LP:633243 Improve regrename to make use of low registers. Get input from Bernd S. and Julian B. Initial implementation has been suggested by Bernd S. Cause: current regrename in gcc treats high and low registers equally. Difficulty: Medium. Recommendation: Implement it as Bernd suggested, and do benchmarking to see how much size is improved. 3. LP:634682 Redundant uxth/sxth insn are generated Cause: Unknown Difficulty: Unknown Recommendation: No recommendation so far. 4. LP:634696 Function is not inlined properly with -Os In consumer/cjpeg/jmemmgr.c, GCC inlined out_of_memory() with -Os, so increase code size. Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Unknown Recommendation: Educate GCC to inline carefully when -Os is turned on. 5. GCC PR40730 LP:634731 Redundant memory load 6. LP:634738 inefficient code to extract least bits from an integer value GCC PR40697 is for thumb-1. The same problem is in thumb-2. Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Medium. Recommendation: Fix it the similar way as fixing GCC PR40697. 7. LP:634891 Replace load/store by memcpy more aggressively Difficulty: Should be easy. Recommendation: Fix to this problem might be "reduce threshold value once -Os is turned on". 8. LP:637220 allocate local variables with fewer instructions GCC PR40657 is about this kind of problem, and was fixed. The similar prolbme exits on gcc with hardfp. Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Unknown. Recommendation: No recommendation so far. 9. GCC PR 43721 Failure to optimize (a/b) and (a%b) into single __aeabi_idivmod call Difficulty: Medium or easy. Recommendation: No. 10. LP:637814 Combine add/move to add LP:637882 Combine ldr/mov to ldr Possible improvements have been found. No idea how to fix it yet. Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Unknown. Recommendation: No. 11. LP:638014 Replace memset by memclr when 2nd parameter is zero Difficulty: Easy. Recommendation: No recommendation so far. 12. LP:625233 Merge constant pools for small functions Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Medium. Recommendation: No. 13. LP:638935 Replace multiple vldr by vldm Some vldr insns accessing consecutive address can be replaced by single vldm. It is not about thumb2, but related to code size optimization. Cause: Unknown. Difficulty: Medium. Recommendation: No. -- Yao Qi CodeSourcery yao(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x739

15 years, 2 months

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