== String routines ==
* Working through updating my eglibc patch for memchr, I think I'm
nearly there - took way too long
to persuade an eglibc make check to work cross (can't get native
build happy).
== QEMU ==
* Sent a new version of my QEMU patch for the atomic helpers to Peter.
* Tested the Android beagle image on a real beagle - it fails in
pretty much the same way as the
QEMU run.
== Other ==
* Had a brief look at bug 825711 - scribus ftbfs on ARM - this is QT
being built to define qreal as
float on ARM when it's double on most other things, scribus
having a qreal variable and something
it's defined as a double and then passing it to a template that
requires two arguments of the same type;
not really sure which one is to blame here!
I'm on holiday next week.
Dave
== GDB ==
* Created and published Linaro GDB 7.3 2011-08 release.
* Analyzed --with-sysroot=remote: testsuite failures,
and opened bug LP #829595.
* Reviewed Yao's latest Thumb-2 displaced stepping patch.
== Schedule ==
* I'll be on vacation 08/23 through 08/31.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter | Geschäftsführung: Dirk
Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen | Registergericht: Amtsgericht
Stuttgart, HRB 243294
Hi,
* continued to work on getting libunwind support for remote unwinding
upstream
* reworked some of the code to address concerns from the ml
* now upstream!
* made smaller fixes to have another libunwind testcase passing
* interfaced with the Linaro Android group to solve an issue where a
compile was failing when using -O3
* turned out that the Linaro GCC vectorizes a loop by generating some
neon instructions
* unfortunately the gas of the 2.20.1 binutils (that is currently
used by the Linaro Android toolchain) doesn't properly understand the
alignment restrictions of the generated asm code and throws an error
* this has be fixed upstream and using a gas from recent binutils
fixes the issue
* Bernhard is already working on getting newer binutils in their
Androuid toolchain build system
* continued the work to get libunwind building on Linaro Android
* wrote an Android.mk and got an initial libunwind.so built (ugly
hacks involved)
* next step is modify the debuggerd to make use of libunwind.so
Note: Next week I'll be on vacation.
Regards
Ken
== This week ==
* Looked at LP #823711. Turned out to be a problem with symbol
visibility in libgcc.a. Tested a fix that was accepted and applied
upstream. Will backport to upstream release branches, so we should
be able to pull the fix in that way.
* Backported the fix for BZ PR49987 to Linaro 4.6 and 4.5.
* Looked at the regrename bug that Ramana reported on gcc@.
* Looked at why libav wasn't being vectorised. Discussed with Ira.
I think we now have a Plan.
* Submitted address writeback scheduling patches upstream.
* Submitted and applied some tweaks to the rtx cost interface upstream.
* Spent a while trying to figure out what the targetm.rtx_costs
API actually is, and how rtx_cost should use it to evaluate the
cost of a SET. Discussed on gcc@.
* Found that ARM was giving SETs a base cost of 4 instructions.
Benchmarked the cost of "fixing" this. It generally seemed positive.
* Wrote a couple of other rtx cost patches.
== Next week ==
* Backport fix for #823711 to upstream branches.
* Hopefully finish off rtx costs stuff.
* Unless there's a clear outcome from the gcc@ discussion, I think
I'll abandon my idea of using insn_rtx_cost in the new auto inc/dec
patch, and simply sum the cost of every SET. Should be a small change.
Richard
* Started running EEMBC on Panda. Got three errors in the automotive test at
this point.
* Started documenting necessary steps for my start-up task:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Internal/ToolChain/Benchmarks/First%20time%20notes
* Upgraded the Snowball board to the latest version (V3). Created a
corresponding test image for Snowball (Linaro 11.06). There is a problem
with the serial console freezing after a couple of minutes without any
error, not sure if it is a complete crash or just the serial output. The
people I have talked to so far has not experienced the same problem. I will
set up the networking for the board and see where ssh gets me.
Best Regards
Åsa
Hi,
- change of default vector size for auto-vectorization on NEON -
submitted and approved
- continued working on vectorization of widening shifts
- looked into SLP vectorization for libav
- two vacation days
I'll be on vacation on Aug 22-30.
Ira
I put a build harness around libav and gathered some profiling data. See:
bzr branch lp:~linaro-toolchain-dev/+junk/libav-suite
It includes a Makefile that builds a C only, h.264 only decoder and
two Creative Commons licensed videos to use as input.
README.rst has the basic commands for running ffmpeg and initial perf
results showing the hot functions. Dave, 20 % of the time is spent in
memcpy() so you might want to have a look.
The vectoriser has no effect. GCC 4.5 is ~17 % faster than 4.6. I'll
look into extracting and harnessing the functions themselves later
this week.
-- Michael
Hi,
is the Linaro toolchain (esp. gcc) useful on x86/x86_64, or is an
attempt to use the Linaro toolchain with such a target just asking for
trouble?
(No, I'm not secretly an Intel spy ;) Just trying to have some fun
with my desktop machine ;) )
ttyl
bero
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release
of Linaro GDB 7.3.
Linaro GDB 7.3 2011.08 is the first release in the 7.3 series. Based
off the latest GDB 7.3, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes.
This release includes all bug fixes from the latest Linaro GDB 7.2
release that were not already included in FSF GDB 7.3.
In addition, this release fixes:
* LP: #804401 [remote testsuite] Thread support
* LP: #804387 [remote testsuite] Shared library test problems
* LP: #804392 [remote testsuite] Rebuilt executables not copied
* LP: #804396 [remote testsuite] Spurious failures
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/+milestone/7.3-2011.08
More information on Linaro GDB is available at:
https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release
of Linaro QEMU 2011.08.
Linaro QEMU 2011.08 is the latest monthly release of qemu-linaro. Based
off upstream (trunk) QEMU, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes
and enhancements.
This month's release is primarily minor improvements:
- Fixes LP:816791: ARMv6 cp15 barrier instructions now work
in linux-user mode as well as system mode
- Support for ARM1176JZF-S core has been added (thanks to
Jamie Iles <jamie(a)jamieiles.com>)
- Add workaround for kernel bug LP:727781 (which has resurfaced
in 3.0) to suppress warnings about bad-width omap i2c accesses
Plus of course new upstream fixes and improvements.
Performance:
When running qemu in system mode with an SD card image we have
determined that performance is best when the image is in writeback
caching mode. This significantly increases the performance of the SD
card (by factors of 10 or more). An example command line option is:
-drive if=sd,cache=writeback,file=my-sd-card.img
Note that cache=writeback may result in data not being written to
disk if the host system powers down unexpectedly (guest crashes
or powerdowns are not a problem).
Known issues:
- The beagle and beaglexm models still do not support USB networking
- There may be some problems with running multithreaded programs in
linux-user mode (LP:823902)
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+milestone/2011.08
Binary builds of this qemu-linaro release are being prepared and
will be available shortly for users of Ubuntu. Packages will be in
the linaro-maintainers tools ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/
More information on Linaro QEMU is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2011.08
release of both Linaro GCC 4.6 and Linaro GCC 4.5.
Linaro GCC 4.6 2011.08 is the sixth release in the 4.6 series. Based
off the latest GCC 4.6.1+svn177703, it focuses on fixing bugs found
during the Android integration and in SMS. This is a quiet release
due to Linaro Connect.
Interesting changes include:
* Updates to 4.6.1+r177703
Fixes:
* LP: #736007 ICE immed_double_const at emit-rtl.c
* LP: #809768 ICE when compiling bionic's libm
* LP: #815777 Inconsistent packaging between tarball and root
directory names
Linaro GCC 4.5 2011.08 is the thirteenth release in the 4.5
series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.3+svn177552, the release is
focused on maintenance.
Interesting changes in 4.5 include:
* Updates to 4.5.3+r177552
* Now builds for PowerPC
Fixes:
* LP: #736007 ICE immed_double_const at emit-rtl.c
* LP: #809768 ICE when compiling bionic's libm
* LP: #815435 ICE: insn does not satisfy its constraints
The source tarballs are available from:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.6-2011.08https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.5-2011.08
Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro
Mailing list: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/
Questions? https://ask.linaro.org/
Interested in commercial support? inquire at support(a)linaro.org
-- Michael
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Richard Earnshaw
<Richard.Earnshaw(a)arm.com> wrote:
> I was just browsing libgmp this afternoon and noticed that it really
> could do with an overhaul to support recent ARM chips.
>
> The ARM code seems to have been written for StrongARM; which is now
> almost obsolete (for example, it loads from a cache line it is about to
> write to in order to pre-allocate the line in the cache).
>
> It doesn't support v4T interworking.
>
> It doesn't make any use of v5 or later instructions.
>
> There is some Thumb(1) code, but again it has no support for
> interworking, is pretty poor and limited in scope.
>
> I'm not sure overall how useful this is to gcc performance; the library
> is needed to build GCC, but I think it's mostly there to support libmpfr.
>
> Nevertheless, there are other apps out there that make use of this
> stuff, including some crypto code, IIRC.
I looked at using gmp as a benchmark some time ago. The assembly
version is twice as fast as the C version already, which is nice. I
assume NEON would be a big improvement as well.
I had a quick poke through the dependencies in Ubuntu and came up with
the following popular packages that use libgmp or libmpfr:
* guile
* python-crypto
* gch (Haskel)
* maxima
* darcs
Nothing earth shattering but probably worthwhile. I've registered:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-misc/+spec/improve-libgmp
so that we don't lose it.
-- Michael
Hi there. The 2011.08 release has been spun and is testing up well.
The 4.5 and 4.6 branches are now open so feel free to commit any
approved patches.
-- Michael
> . Would you be interested in adding a Firefox-based benchmark? As a large
> application it is a good testbed for LTO, FDO and other aggressive
> optimizations.
Sorry about the delayed response. I did notice your mail last week but
I was busy with our conference and then the first couple of days this
week have just disappeared with some internal training.
I would be interested in hearing how you get on with LTO and FDO on
ARM. Listening to Honza talking at the GCC unconference in London
about the memory usage for full LTO with trunk I did wonder what would
happen if we tried it on the ARM target to see what we got, but I
never managed to get around to trying anything there :) . We did look
at getting FDO working with Linaro GCC last cycle but there are still
a couple of issues with PGO in Linaro GCC 4.5.
With respect to LTO , the one problem we have currently is that the
Neon intrinsics aren't streamed out and streamed back in. So you might
have a few issues if your code uses arm_neon.h .
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+bug/823548 is an example of
this problem. This was fixed upstream and we probably just need to
backport that into our 4.6 tree. I've tried a backport this morning
and I think I have this right finally.
If you could do a build and a firefox benchmark run in about 30-60
minutes by all means please do let us know how you get on and what you
find. We've been steadily trying to improve the performance of the ARM
toolchain and the biggest improvements you'll notice will be with the
vectorizer but there will be other small improvements that you'll
notice in other general areas of code generation. We would be
interested in feedback about what can be done and to add to our queue
of things to look at and improve for the ARM port of GCC.
With respect to the images, Kiko's probably answered that bit.
cheers
Ramana
* GCC
Continued tracking down problems in my various broken patches. Fixed one
bug, investigated two more. Re-submitted the widening multiplies for
testing, and this time it returned with no problems. Yay, I can now
check it in next week.
Merged from upstream GCC 4.5. The launchpad import bug still exists
(although should not for much longer) so I had to ask on #launchpad to
get the imports done. Submitted the merged branch for testing.
Tried to merge GCC 4.6 similarly, but failed. Bzr just refused to play
ball, which was very frustrating. Michael Hope has now done the merge
instead.
* Other
On leave Wednesday and Friday.
* libauqntum - running the SMSed version on ARM machine did not show
significant improvement. Discussed it with Richard Sandiford.
Apparently in the SMS phase the instructions are of DI mode due to the
fact the loop contains 64 bit operations while they later been
generated as 32 bit operations. This makes SMS less accurate and I'm
now looking into a version which disables DI mode operations.
* Started to look at the potential of SMS on libav. Initial runs of
Richard's microbenchmarks with SMS show some regressions as well as
improvements that I'm looking at.
Hi there. I've written up the standard configurations that we use to
build and test Linaro GCC:
https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Configurations/GCC
It includes such things as flags, libraries, and sysroots. You might
find it useful to see what we're testing or, if new to compilers, what
a good starting point is.
-- Michael
== QEMU ==
* Finished off a first cut of the 64bit helper patch to QEMU
- Gave it to Peter and have reworked most of the things he commented on
* This also lead into a bit of a rabbit hole of finding various
generic QEMU threading issues
* Tested Peter's 11.08 QEMU release
(I used linaro-fetch-image-ui for the first time to grab the
release images; quite nice, hit
a couple of issues but much nicer than crawling around the site
to find where the hwpacks
are).
== Other ==
* Pinged gcc patches list for more comments on 64bit atomic patch
I'm on holiday the week of 22nd (i.e. the week after next).
Dave
== GDB ==
* Re-tested Linaro GDB 7.3 on Versatile Express (native
& remote testing).
* Committed patch to re-enable remote thread test cases
(#804401) to mainline and Linaro GDB 7.3.
* Reviewed Yao's latest Thumb-2 displaced stepping patch.
== GCC ==
* Patch review week.
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
RAG:
Red:
Amber: OMAP3 patch upstreaming is slower progress than hoped
Green:
Current Milestones:
|| || Planned || Estimate || Actual ||
||qemu-linaro 2011-08 || 2011-08-18 || 2011-08-18 || ||
Historical Milestones:
||qemu-linaro 2011-04 || 2011-04-21 || 2011-04-21 || 2011-04-21 ||
||qemu-linaro 2011-05 || 2011-05-19 || 2011-05-19 || n/a ||
||close out 1105 blueprints || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-19 ||
||complete 1111 planning || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-27 ||
||qemu-linaro-2011-06 || 2011-06-16 || 2011-06-16 || 2011-06-16 ||
||qemu-linaro-2011-07 || 2011-07-21 || 2011-07-21 || 2011-07-21 ||
== linaro-qemu-11.11 ==
* put together release candidate tarball for 2011.08 release, tested
* added a workaround for omap kernel bug LP:727781 which had been fixed
in 2.6.x but has resurfaced in 3.0
* tarball now ready and only needs releasing next week
== 64-bit-sync-primitives ==
* reviewed David Gilbert's qemu patches to support 64 bit sync primitives
== upstream-omap3-patches ==
* testing/reading Avi's memory API patches to see how they fit in or
clash with the qdevification and other omap3 patches
== other ==
* more investigation/thought about LP:823902 -- qemu bug running
multithreaded programs in linux-user mode
* Manned Linaro demo stand at ARM Partner Meeting (Tue, Wed)
* Meetings: GSoC student x2, toolchain, toolchain standup, 1-2-1
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences:
15-19 August: KVM Forum and LinuxCon NA, Vancouver
== GCC ==
=== Progress ===
* Linaro sprint last week - one day of fun with broken laptop.
* Looked at how we could get BUILTIN_VECTORIZE_CONVERT work to allow
vectorizing some of the floating point conversions.
* Fixed PR50022 . Couple of iterations.
* Internal training for 2 days.
* Dusted off a couple of my old patches and sent them out after testing.
* Next to get back to old VFP and ivopts patch.
* Looked at a testfailure with -mvectorize-with-neon-quads with Ira .
=== Plans ===
* Continue to look at the test failure with mvectorize-with-neon-quad
* Finish off optimize_size patch based on comments.
* finish off case for handling tbh instrucitons.
* Commit fix for PR50022
* Look at some of the issues with VFP moves and try and get forward with it.
* Look at BRANCH_COST results.
Meetings:
* 1-1s
* TCWG calls
* GNU Toolchain planning meeting.
* Some patch review and bugzilla triaging.
Absences.
* 1st Aug - 5th August - Linaro sprint.
* 8th - 9th August - Internal training.
* 29th Aug - Sept. 2 - Holiday booked and approved.
* 31st Oct - 4th Nov - Linaro Summit Orlando - Travel to be booked.
== This week ==
* Looked a bug report that the fix for LP #736007 had caused regressions
on powerpc-darwin. It turned out to be a target-specific bug; the
backend has the same const_vector code as i386 and spu, but the fix for
PR34856 was never applied there. I'll submit the patch (and backport to
Linaro 4.6) once the bug submitter has had a chance to test it.
* Experimented with -falign-loops. Found that it triggered a bug in the
ARM minipool layout code. Posted patch upstream and committed.
Backported to 4.6.
* Committed patch to allow globs in define_bypass.
* Updated auto inc/dec patch after comments from Bernd and Stephen.
I'm pretty happy with it now, but there are a couple of prerequisite
patches I need to sort out first.
* Started getting those prerequisites ready.
* Decided that we needed something a bit more subtle than my original
insn_rtx_cost patch: at the moment, we simply don't use rtx costs
for lvalues. Wrote a series of patches to "improve" the rtx_cost
interface, including providing the outer operand number and an
indication of whether the rtx is an lvalue or an rvalue.
* Upgraded my laptop. This turnted out to be more eventful than
anticipated, and ended up taking a whole day.
== Next week ==
* Post auto inc/dec preparatory patches for review. Hopefully post
an RFA for the pass itself.
Richard
Hi,
* worked on getting the remote unwind support for ARM upstream
* noticed when building a recent android image of the
linaro_android_2.3.4 branch for the panda the init.rc attempts to mount
wrong partitions
* tracked down the commit and opened a bug
* linaro android team fixed it real quick
* started to integrate libunwind into Andriod
* two issues here:
- the build system requires an Android.mk (while libunwind is
autoconf+libtool based)
- libunwind uses some interfaces/headers that are not provided by the
bionlic libc
Regards
Ken
On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 12:03:00PM -0700, Taras Glek wrote:
> Recently we have been looking at how to squeeze more performance out
> of our toolchain for building Firefox on Android. Mike Hommey
> integrated GCC 4.6 into the android NDK and has been testing
> performance (with mixed results
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-08/msg00096.html).
You should definitely be trying to build using the Linaro 4.5 and 4.6
compiler branches; they are pretty much guaranteed to give you better
performance, and if they don't, we're on the hook to fix it quickly! All
the patches go upstream, so there is no risk of you being stuck on a
fork -- it just makes everything you need available right now.
I'm copying the linaro-toolchain list to make sure that you get the
right people's attention (though if they weren't all coming back from
Connect in Cambridge this week they would have picked the email up
already).
> I like how Linaro is doing regular arm benchmarking, ie
> https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidToolchainBenchmarking/2011-…
We do much more than that, but it's not as easy to find right now; for
instance http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/benchcompare is Michael's
regular release benchmark.
> . Would you be interested in adding a Firefox-based benchmark? As a
> large application it is a good testbed for LTO, FDO and other
> aggressive optimizations.
Totally. Let's do it. Can you give me an idea of what boards you are
testing the build on today? Do you have a test suite that we could run
in a reasonable timeframe (hours, not days)?
> We are also looking at setting a developer-friendly android ROM with
> oprofile, perf, systemtap, gdb, debug symbols, etc. It might even be
> beneficial for us to use newer kernels as we exlore options like
> kernel-assisted ld.so relocations, etc. That seems to similar to
> what Linaro provides in the evaluation ROMS. Is there any chance of
> Linaro providing developer-friendly "evaluation" ROMs for retail
> phones like the Nexus S?
It's indeed pretty similar (we just call them LEBs), and Zach will be
really interested in working with you on this.
As for supporting actual released phones, it lies somewhat outside of
our optimal operating model, and we don't have any hardware available. I
guess we could do a spin for a specific model if we had enough of them
to use by a set of engineers in the different teams. They are so
expensive, though. Do you guys have lots of them?
--
Christian Robottom Reis, Engineering VP
Brazil (GMT-3) | [+55] 16 9112 6430 | [+1] 612 216 4935
Linaro.org: Open Source Software for ARM SoCs
Hi there. This is a heads-up that the name of the Toolchain group
releases will change slightly with next weeks release. We're dropping
the respin suffix (the -0) to line up with the new whole of Linaro
naming convention.
What was:
gcc-linaro-4.6-2011.xx-0.tar.bz2
gdb-linaro-7.2-2011.xx-0.tar.bz2
qemu-linaro-0.15-2011.xx-0.tar.bz2
will now be:
gcc-linaro-4.6-2011.xx.tar.bz2
gdb-linaro-7.2-2011.xx.tar.bz2
qemu-linaro-0.15-2011.xx.tar.bz2
Earth shattering, eh? I've taken the opportunity to write up our
naming convention at the same time:
https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Naming
-- Michael
