- linaro-toolchain - lists.linaro.org

by Michael Hope

Hi there. Some of the tr-* blueprints had work items in them and this was interfering with the tools that the PM guys use. I've created new engineering blueprints, pulled the work items across into them, and added the new engineering blueprint as a dependency of the old TR. Sorry for the blueprint spam. In most cases the new blueprint has the same name and subject as the TR one, such as the TR: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro/+spec/tr-toolchain-4.5-in-distros which is backed by the engineering blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+spec/4.5-in-distros -- Michael

14 years, 5 months

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RFC: -mimplicit-it and GCC upstream

by Dave Martin

Hi Richard, Recapping on this earlier conversation: http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-toolchain/2010-July/000030.html http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-toolchain/2010-July/000035.html Is it worth another attempt to make a case to upstream for supporting passing -mimplicit-it=thumb by default to gas? According to my understanding of this issue, my argument would go as follows: * gcc currently estimates the size of asm blocks, rather than determining the size accurately. * gcc cannot guarantee the right answer for asm block size when asm blocks contain directives etc., however use of directives in asm blocks is widespread * gcc cannot guarantee the right answer for asm block size in Thumb-2. gcc conservatively overestimates the size by assuming that each statement of the asm block expands to 4 bytes. * All of Ubuntu lucid and maverick has been built with -mimplicit-it=thumb passwd by default, with no known build or runtime failures arising from this (so size issues aside, we have confidence that the resulting code generation is sound) * -mimplicit-it=thumb -mthumb makes the asm block size estimation unsafe: the asm block can exceed the estimated size even in the absence of directives, which may lead to fixup range errors during assembly. * Following the principles already established for Thumb-2 in general the estimation can be made safe (or, as safe as the established Thumb-2 behaviour) by raising the assumed maximum statement expansion size for asm blocks to 6 bytes, since -mimplicit-it will add as most a single (16-bit) IT instruction to each statement. * The vast majority of all asm blocks are small (< 20 instructions, say), so the overall overestimate in sizes will generally be modest for any given compilation unit. * -mimplicit-it is already _required_ by the Linux kernel and possible other projects. ...so... * With -mimplicit-it=thumb and a 6-byte asm block statement expansion size estimate, we have toolchain behaviour which is as reliable, and as correct, as it is in upstream at present. * Layout of data in the compiler output will be more optimal in some cases, and less optimal in other cases, compared with the the current Thumb-2 behaviour, due to differing asm block size estimates. The exact behaviour will depend on the distribution of conditional instructions within asm blocks. * Taken over a whole compilation unit, the total code size overestimate (and therefore the impact on object layout) will normally be modest, due to the small typical size of asm blocks. * Behaviour for -marm will not be impacted at all. If gcc currently estimated asm block code size accurately, then I could understand upstream's objection; but as it stands it seems to me we wouldn't be making anything worse in practice with the proposed change; and there is no compatibility impact (other than positive impact). Of course, I may have some wrong assumptions here, or there may be some background I'm not aware of... Comments? Cheers ---Dave

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] December 6th-12th

by Julian Brown

== Linaro GCC == * Finish testing for big-endian/quad-word patch on mainline, and send upstream. Not yet reviewed by an ARM maintainer, but Joseph suggested tweaking DejaGnu's target-supports to better reflect the new capabilities of the vectorizer in big-endian mode. I've not looked into that yet. * Started looking at improving element/structure load/store intrinsics. Made it so that the structs used for loads/stores are created in the backend so that the types can be used directly by the builtins, but discovered that the front-end/middle-end would not play along with that plan as they are. Thought about ways to fix that. * Some time spent on other CodeSourcery stuff.

14 years, 5 months

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Linaro GCC 4.4 and 4.5 2010-12 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 4.5 is the fifth release in the 4.5 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.5.1+svn167157, it includes many ARM-focused performance improvements and bug fixes. Linaro GCC 4.4 is the fifth release in the 4.4 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.4.5, it is a maintenance release that fixes one problem found through use. Interesting changes include: * A new performance focused extension elimination pass * Speed and size improvements when loading constants * Performance improvements on compound conditionals * A range of correctness improvements The source tarballs are available from: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.5-2010.12-0 and https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.4-2010.12-0 Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro No changes have been committed to Linaro GDB 7.2 this month. -- Michael

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] 6th - 10th December

by Andrew Stubbs

* Linaro GCC 4.4/4.5 Merged the latest CS patches and Linaro merge requests into Linaro GCC (4.4 and 4.5). Ran regression tests. Yao's patch failed so I backed it out, and made the release tarballs. Uploaded the releases to Michael Hope for release. lp:686381: luatex fails to build with gcc-4.5 Fired off a test build to reproduce the problem. Will come back to this next week. * GCC 4.6/4.7 Posted my various queued patches up to gcc-patches(a)gcc.gnu.org for review. Looked at the state of the GCC 4.6 upstream build. There are currently two problems: 1. libquadmath must be disabled in a cross-build for the bootstrap phases. 2. libstdc++ doesn't build. There is a patch for it on the mail list, but it's not applied yet. Once gcc 4.6 builds cleanly, I shall update the Launchpad 4.6 branch, and declare that the baseline for our development. We'll then have somewhere to commit and track patches awaiting GCC stage 1 development. * Other Caught up with email following my holiday. Yet again, my IGEPv2 board suffered a corrupt file system. I've now upgraded the kernel and configured it to use an NFS root. The board is now somewhat less mobile, but should work more reliably. Continued organizing the a brain-storming session for GCC optimization improvements. Organised flights and hotel for both the Linaro Sprint and CodeSourcery annual meeting in January.

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Dec. 06 -- Dec. 12

by Zach Welch

== Last Week == * Spent time tracking down a couple of regressions that appeared in the new ltrace release-candidate tree. Submitted a bunch of patches to fix the issues that were discovered during that process; most have been applied. * Finished writing fairly generic code for handling ARM-specific unwind tables, from lookup through decoding and dispatch. It uses a few definitions specific to libunwind, but those probably could be eliminated with more work. == This Week == * Integrate new ARM-specific bits into libunwind framework. * Rewrite part of a portability patch for ltrace and hope that those changes reflect the very last effort that will be required for that particular task. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

14 years, 5 months

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Re: Neon registers in core files

by Dave Martin

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Yao Qi <yao.qi(a)linaro.org> wrote: > Hi, Kernel WG, > Can recent kernel handle NEON registers in corefiles? > > Seems we've had plan for this in "Ensure full NEON debug support" in > https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/KernelConsolidation/Specs/BSPInvestig… > Any progress on this piece of work? We want to handle NEON registers in > corefiles from GDB, which required kernel dump them in corefile first. Hmmm, actually that bullet may have ended up in the wrong place ... since it's not a BSP-specific feature. Anyway, looking at the kernel code, it looks like the VFP/NEON state is not dumped into the core file. If it makes you feel better, the state of the obsolete FPE extension registers is dumped, if used :/ My guess is that it shouldn't be hard to dump the VFP/NEON state, but GDB and the kernel need to agree on the format. Rather that trying to hack the existing register dump format in a compatible way, I suggest it's simplest if the kernel creates an extra section in the dump containing something like: .long format_version /* reserved for future expansion - must be 0 */ .long FPSID .long FPSCR .long MVFR0 /* or 0 if not present in the hardware */ .long MVFR1 /* or 0 if not present in the hardware */ .long d0 .long d1 /* ... d2-d14 ... */ .long d15 If 32 D-registers in the hardware [ .long d16 .long d17 /* ... d18-d30 ... */ .long d31 ] I believe we don't need any extra flags to indicate whether the MVFRx fields are valid, since 0 in these registers indicates the VFPv2/legacy behaviour anyway. Note that some VFPv2 implementations (such as ARM1176) do provide these registers, and where the hardware has them, the kernel can fill them in when doing the coredump. We _should_ be prepared to ignore these fields (or interpret them differently) if a vendor-specific VFP subarchitecture is specified (by (FPSID & 0x4000) == 0x4000) The number of D-registers can be deduced from the FPSID and MVFRx registers, so we don't need to record it explicitly. When MVFRx are not present, there are 16 D-registers. When MVFRx are present, and (MVFR0 & 0xF) >= 2, there are 32 (or more) D-registers This is just a sketch -- the ARM ARM is the authoritative reference on the meanings of these bitfields. Any views on this? Cheers ---Dave > > _______________________________________________ > linaro-dev mailing list > linaro-dev(a)lists.linaro.org > http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev >

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Dec 6 - Dec 10

by Ulrich Weigand

== GCC == * Tracked down root cause of GCC mainline bootstrap failure on ARM (PR 46040 - "__DTOR_LIST__ undeclared"). == Miscellaneous == * Set up IGEP v2 board (w/ local disk, network, ...) as native GCC / GDB build environment. * Gave talk on Linaro at the "2010 Linux Community Event" at Siemens Munich (w/ Arnd Bergmann). 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

14 years, 5 months

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Invitation: TWG GCC Optimization @ Wed 2010-12-15 9am - 10am (linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org)

by Andrew Stubbs

You have been invited to the following event. Title: TWG GCC Optimization Discuss ideas for improving GCC optimization for ARM. Open to anybody who wants to contribute. https://wiki.linaro.org/AndrewStubbs/Sandbox/GCCoptimizations International: +44 1452 567 588 UK: 0844 493 3801 Brazil: 08008912092 China: 108007121533 India: 0008001006354 Taiwan: 00801126472 United States: 18666161738 Conference code 2634417169# When: Wed 2010-12-15 9am – 10am London Where: Conference call code 263 441 7169 Calendar: linaro-toolchain(a)lists.linaro.org Who: * andrew.stubbs(a)linaro.org - creator * Ken Werner - optional * stevenb.gcc(a)gmail.com - optional * Michael Hope - optional * David Gilbert - optional * Peter Maydell - optional * ulrich.weigand(a)de.ibm.com - optional * Yao Qi - optional * Julian Brown - optional * paul(a)codesourcery.com - optional * Ira Rosen - optional * richard.earnshaw(a)arm.com - optional * Chung-Lin Tang - optional * mark(a)codesourcery.com - optional * linaro-toolchain(a)lists.linaro.org - optional * Richard Sandiford - optional * Marcin Juszkiewicz - optional * zwelch(a)codesourcery.com - optional Your attendance is optional. Event details: https://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=VIEW&eid=aXJlc2Z2bWZmZzQ5cGQ4b… Invitation from Google Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/ You are receiving this courtesy email at the account linaro-toolchain(a)lists.linaro.org because you are an attendee of this event. To stop receiving future notifications for this event, decline this event. Alternatively you can sign up for a Google account at https://www.google.com/calendar/ and control your notification settings for your entire calendar.

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Dec.6th -- Dec.12th

by Chung-Lin Tang

== GCC related == * PR44557, Thumb-1 ICE: found two small needed corrections in the ARM backend to fix this. Sent patch upstream. * LP:641397/PR46888: bitfield insert optimization. Posted patch along with Andrew Stubbs' CSE patch upstream. The two-patch situation seemed to stir some discussion :) It seems both patches were deemed okay, though it would be better if there was some testcase that passed through unhandled by Andrew's CSE patch, but processed by my combine fix later in the pass pipeline. Both patches queued at GCC bugzilla page, to be handled in the next stage1. * LP:687406/PR46865, -save-temps creating different code. Analyzed problem, though slow to send fix upstream. Had some discussion on the list on how the fix should be like. * PR46667, section type conflicts. Tested and sent mail to gcc-patches. Jan Hubicka picked it up and pinged for an approval again. Hope this get resolved soon. * PR45416, ARM code regression. ARM considerations are mostly okay, main issue remaining is how to solve the x86 regression. The current expand code does a full DImode shift just to obtain a single bit, might be point of improvement to solve this. * LP:685534, ftbfs with gcc-linaro 4.5 on amd64. Found to be another erroneous inline asm case. Fixed and updated on LP. == This week == * More upstream and Linaro GCC issues. * Start dealing with January travel. * Think more about larger (Linaro) GCC optimization projects.

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Dec 6th -- Dec 12th

by Yao Qi

== Linaro GDB == * LP:616000 Handle -fstack-protector prologue code Understand how frame affect expression validation in GDB. Improve i386 prologue parsing to handle 'and/add' sequence. Revise i386 prologue parsing for stack protector. Patch is not submitted since still lack of i386 prologue knowledge, and not very confident on that patch. Understand prologue-value used in ARM prologue parsing and relationship of symbol and frame in GDB. Make ARM prologue parsing understands stack protector code by identify the code sequence. Improve the patch by supporting ARM mode and ARMv5T, in order to make this patch accepted by upstreams. * LP:615972 gdb.base/gcore.exp failure. The failure is about "corefile restored general registers", which is not related to NEON register support in corefile. It is caused by inconsistent register types and names between tdesc and arm. The cause of this failure is found, but upstreams reviewer doesn't agree on one of my fix. As he suggested, arm-core.xml is modified to add "type=XXX", but get some errors when regenerate arm-with-iwmmxt.c. Filed GDB PR 12308. == GCC == * register rename improvements (LP:633243) Finally, got both middle-end part and ARM part approved. Committed to upstreams mainline. Some benchmarks in EEMBC shows 0.1%~0.2% code size reduction. == This Week == * Ping my GDB patches. * Fix GDB PR 12308, which blocks my fix for LP:615972. * Backport my approved patches to Linaro GDB if any. Fix other GDB bugs. * Pass one GCC patch in my queue to review, if I have extra time. == Vacation == Take vacation on Dec 30th and 31st. Travel to ChengDu, and back on 3rd Jan (It is public holiday in China). Back to work on 4th Jan. -- Yao (齐尧)

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Weekly status

by Richard Sandiford

== This week == * Away Monday and Tuesday. * Very little the rest of the week due to other IBM commitments. I've just finished the main part of that work, so all being well, it should only need a bit of nannying next week. Most of the week should be Linaro. * Started trying to reproduce #641126, but realised that I'd need to set myself up for general Ubuntu cross package building first. Started to look at what's involved. == Next week == * Get stuck into #641126. * More STT_GNU_IFUNC and vectors. Richard

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] report week 49

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: ** I have sent out an updated ARM fixes pull request, all of whose components have been Reviewed-by: Nathan Froyd; I expect this to be merged shortly. ** vqshl(reg) patch posted to list; I have an update which also addresses vqshl{,u}(imm) which I'll send out as v2 once the first part has been reviewed. ** reviewed and retransmitted Wolfgang's semihosting commandline patches since he is having trouble sending unmangled mail to the list ** went through the monster qemu-maemo commit "Lots of ARM TCG changes" http://meego.gitorious.org/qemu-maemo/qemu/commit/3f17d4e1cb identifying what fixes it includes ** started looking at a VRSQRTS patch. This uncovered a number of qemu issues: NaN propagation is wrong, flush-to-zero handling is only flushing output denormals, not input denormals, and we don't handle the Neon "standard FPSCR value" but always use the real FPSCR. I have some preliminary patches for at least some of this, but since they affect a number of the same bits of code that are touched by existing not-yet-committed patches I'm waiting for those to be committed first. * verify-emulation: ** wrote a README for risu and made it public at http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/pmaydell/risu.git;a=summary * maintain-beagle-models: ** the ubuntu maverick netbook image doesn't boot on qemu because it uses the OMAP NAND prefetch/DMA, which isn't modelled https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu-maemo/+bug/645311 I've started on this and am perhaps halfway through (basic prefetch code implemented, but DMA and debugging still to go) * other: ** took part in an OBS mini-sprint where we were walked through how the OBS buildsystem works and can be used to do test rebuilds of Meego with new versions of the toolchain. Meetings: toolchain, pdsw-tools Plans: * finish omap NAND prefetch engine work * make sure ARM changes get committed to qemu... 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, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] weekly status

by Ken Werner

Hi, * created custom kernel deb packages from the linaro-linux tree in order to * test the various ftrace tracers and profilers available on ARM * results at: https://wiki.linaro.org/KenWerner/Sandbox/ftrace * started to look into crash (kexec, kdump) but wasn't able to generate a kernel dump yet Regards Ken

14 years, 5 months

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Perfromance Test Results using gcc-linaro-4.5-2010.11-1

by Prashanth S

Dear All Our team in Samsung collected some performance metrics for the following 3 GCC cross compilers 1.. Gentoo Complier(part of Chrome OS Build Environment) 2.. GCC 4.4.1 (Code Sourcery). 3.. Linaro (gcc-linaro-4.5-2010.11-1) Flags used to Build Linaro Tool chain used Michael Hope Script .Just modified "GCCFLAGS = --with-mode=thumb --with-arch=armv7-a --with-float=softfp --with-fpu=neon --with-fpu=vfpv3-d16" a.. Using the above three tool chains we compiled the kernel of Chrome OS and did Coremark Performance test.(With same optimisation flag mentioned in the attachment) b.. Test Environment for all the three are the same. My Questions 1.. Is there any build options that I am missing while I am building the Cross Compiler? 2.. Else is this performance degradation is a know issue and is the tool chain group working on it?.(If so whom to contact?) Any Pointers from you would be of great help to me. If you need any further details also do ping me Regards Prashanth S

14 years, 5 months

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GCC Optimization Brain Storming Session

by Andrew Stubbs

Hi All, As we discussed on Monday, I think it might be helpful to get a number of knowledgeable people together on a call to discuss GCC optimization opportunities. So, I'd like to get some idea of who would like to attend, and we'll try to find a slot we can all make. I'm on vacation next week, so I expect it'll be in two or three week's time. Before we get there, I'd like to have a list of ideas to discuss. Partly so that we don't forget anything, and partly so that people can have a think about them before the day. I'm really looking for bigger picture stuff, rather than individual poor code generation bugs. So here's a few to kick off: * Costs tuning. - GCC 4.6 has a new costs model, but are we making full use of it? - What about optimizing for size? - Do the optimizers take any notice? [1] * 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] * 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) * NEON - There's already a lot of work going on here, and I don't want it to hog all our time, but it might be worth touching on. What else? I'm not the most experienced person with GCC internals, and I'm relatively new to the ARM specific parts of those, so somebody else must be able to come up with something far more exciting! So, please, get brain-storming! Andrew [1] We discovered recently that combine is happy to take two insns and combine them into a pattern that matches a splitter that then explodes into three insns (partly due to being no longer able to generate pseudo-registers). [2] For example, I just wrote a patch to add addw and subw support (not yet submitted). [3] LP:643479 is an example of a case where we don't.

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] 2010-12-09

by David Gilbert

Mostly more working with libffi; swapping some ideas back and forwards with Marcus Shawcroft and it looks like we have a good way forward. Got an armhf chroot going, libffi built. Got a testcase failing as expected. Trying to look at other processors ABIs to understand why varargs works for anyone else. Cut through one layer of red tape; can now do the next level of comparison in the string routine work. Started looking at SPEC; hit problems with network stability on VExpress (turns out to be bug 673820) long long weekend; short weeks=2; Back in on Tuesday. Dave

14 years, 5 months

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Silverbell

by David Gilbert

Hi, Those of you use silverbell may be glad to know it's back up. Be a little careful, if you shovel large amounts of stuff over it's network the network tends to disappear. (Not sure if this is hardware or driver) Dave

14 years, 5 months

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Hard float chroot

by David Gilbert

Hi, As mentioned on the standup, I just got an armhf chroot going, thanks to markos for pointing me at using multistrap I put the following in a armhfmultistrap.conf and did multistrap -f armhfmultistrap.conf Once that's done, chroot in and then do dpkg --configure -a it's pretty sparse in there, but it's enough to get going. Dave ============================================== [General] arch=armhf directory=/discs/more/armhf cleanup=true noauth=true unpack=true explicitsuite=false aptsources=unstable unreleased bootstrap=unstable unreleased [unstable] packages= source=http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports/ keyring=debian-archive-keyring suite=unstable omitdebsrc=true [unreleased] packages= source=http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports/ keyring=debian-archive-keyring suite=unreleased omitdebsrc=true

14 years, 5 months

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risu instruction set test harness now publicly available

by Peter Maydell

Hi. As part of my work on qemu I've written a simplistic random instruction sequence generator and test harness. To quote the README: risu is a tool intended to assist in testing the implementation of models of the ARM architecture such as qemu and valgrind. In particular it restricts itself to considering the parts of the architecture visible from Linux userspace, so it can be used to test programs which only implement userspace, like valgrind and qemu's linux-user mode. I don't particularly expect this tool to be of much general interest outside people developing either qemu or valgrind or similar models, but I have in any case made it publicly available now: http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/pmaydell/risu.git;a=tree -- PMM

14 years, 5 months

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RFC: Dynamic hwcaps

by Dave Martin

Hi all, I'd be interested in people's views on the following idea-- feel free to ignore if it doesn't interest you. For power-management purposes, it's useful to be able to turn off functional blocks on the SoC. For on-SoC peripherals, this can be managed through the driver framework in the kernel, but for functional blocks of the CPU itself which are used by instruction set extensions, such as NEON or other media accelerators, it would be interesting if processes could adapt to these units appearing and disappearing at runtime. This would mean that user processes would need to select dynamically between different implementations of accelerated functionality at runtime. This allows for more active power management of such functional blocks: if the CPU is not fully loaded, you can turn them off -- the kernel can spot when there is significant idle time and do this. If the CPU becomes fully loaded, applications which have soft-realtime constraints can notice this and switch to their accelerated code (which will cause the kernel to switch the functional unit(s) on). Or, the kernel can react to increasing CPU load by speculatively turn it on instead. This is analogous to the behaviour of other power governors in the system. Non-aware applications will still work seamlessly -- these may simply run accelerated code if the hardware supports it, causing the kernel to turn the affected functional block(s) on. In order for this to work, some dynamic status information would need to be visible to each user process, and polled each time a function with a dynamically switchable choice of implementations gets called. You probably don't need to worry about race conditions either-- if the process accidentally tries to use a turned-off feature, you will take a fault which gives the kernel the chance to turn the feature back on. Generally, this should be a rare occurrence. The dynamic feature status information should ideally be per-CPU global, though we could have a separate copy per thread, at the cost of more memory. It can't be system-global, since different CPUs may have a different set of functional blocks active at any one time -- for this reason, the information can't be stored in an existing mapping such as the vectors page. Conversely, existing mechanisms such sysfs probably involve too much overhead to be polled every time you call copy_pixmap() or whatever. Alternatively, each thread could register a userspace buffer (a single word is probably adequate) into which the CPU pokes the hardware status flags each time it returns to userspace, if the hardware status has changed or if the thread has been migrated. Either of the above approaches could be prototyped as an mmap'able driver, though this may not be the best approach in the long run. Does anyone have a view on whether this is a worthwhile idea, or what the best approach would be? Cheers ---Dave

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] November 29th-December 5th

by Julian Brown

== Linaro GCC == * Worked on quad-word/big-endian fixes patch. Sent off a version on Tuesday which worked OK, but which made some awkward changes to the middle-end. Tried to re-think those parts, but without much luck: came to the conclusion that spending more time trying to fix element-ordering-dependent operations on quad-word vectors in big-endian mode was probably not worth the effort (since we plan to be changing things in that area anyway). Wrote a much-simplified patch which simply disables those patterns, and ported it to mainline. * Then, spent some time trying to set up big-endian testing with a mainline build, since the lack of such an option is partly why we got into this mess to start with. My current plan (as well as testing the above patch) is to create an upstreamable patch to easily enable big-endian (Linux) multilibs, in the hope that it'll generally make big-endian testing easier. (Of course people will still need test harness configurations which will allow running big & little-endian code, which most won't have.) * Also, ping lp675347 (volatile bitfields vs. QT atomics), and do some some extra checks suggested by DJ Delorie, which seemed to work out fine. Backported patch for lp629671 to Linaro 4.4 branch, and ran tests (also fine). * Continued discussion of internal representations for fancy vector loads/stores in GIMPLE/RTL on linaro-toolchain.

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Nov. 19 -- Dec. 05

by Zach Welch

== Last Week == * Continued implementing support for ARM unwind tables in libunwind. * Sent patches upstream to improve binutils's readelf, adding support for all remaining unwind table instructions (i.e. VFP/NEON and WMMX). When used on ARMv7a, provides meaningful output for previously 'unsupported' opcodes that get used in some libraries (e.g. glibc). == This Week == * Continue working on libunwind. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwelch(a)codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743

14 years, 5 months

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[ACTIVITY] Nov 29 - Dec 3

by Ulrich Weigand

== GDB == * Posted updated implementation of #661253 (Improve backtrace by using ARM exception tables) to gdb-patches, which includes several changes requested by reviewers * Posted updated patch to further improve backtrace (in the absence of debug info) to gdb-patches * Commented on a couple of GDB LP bugs == Miscellaneous == * Started setting up IGEP v2 board 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

14 years, 5 months

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qemu linux-user mode issues

by Peter Maydell

Since it came up in the toolchain meeting this morning, some links to issues people are having doing ARM scratchbox-style builds because of generic linux-user issues: http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10529 # linux-user's mmap implementation isn't very smart https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/668799 # qemu locking issues which can cause build failures (sometimes) -- PMM

14 years, 5 months

1
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[ACTIVITY] week 48

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, 5 months

1
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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, 5 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, 5 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 months

5
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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, 6 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, 6 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

14 years, 6 months

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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.

14 years, 6 months

1
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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

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

2
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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)

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

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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)

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

1
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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.

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

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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

14 years, 6 months

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