- linaro-toolchain - lists.linaro.org

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.

15 years, 5 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.

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 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, 5 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.

15 years, 5 months

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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, 5 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

15 years, 5 months

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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, 5 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

15 years, 5 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)

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 months

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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, 5 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

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 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

15 years, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

1
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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, 5 months

4
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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, 5 months

1
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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, 5 months

3
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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

2
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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

3
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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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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, 5 months

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