* Linaro GCC
Spun 4.5 and 4.6 2011.09 GCC release tarballs. Uploaded them to
Michael's server, and kicked off the tests.
Continued work on my new constant optimization experiments. I now have
it tracking all the constants and am looking at how to detect the
optimization opportunities. So far it only calculates how exprensive it
would be to generate a value by adding to an existing constant, which is
a start at least. I'm having difficulties detecting whether changing an
insn will make it's parent (dependency-wise) obsolete, or not (and
therefore whether to count its costs - there's no problem for
instructions that overwrite an entire register, but ones that write to
portions of registers (such as MOVT) make more complex dependency
chains, and the def-use chains don't seem to be sorted into the order of
use.
* Other
Half day vacation on Thursday.
* Added testcases to Richard's micro benchmarks taken from libav.
* Discussed with Ayal the new version of the patch to support
instructions with
REG_INC_NOTE in SMS which causes bootstrap failure. I intend to debug
the bootstrap failure in order to find the cause for it.
(http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-08/msg01216.html)
== String routines ==
* Tidying up bits of cortex strings for the release process
* Nailing down the behaviour of config.sub and the config systems in
gcc, binutils and eglibc
== Other ==
* A discussion on synchronisation primitives on various CPUs that
started on the gcc list
- looking at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/cpp/cpp0xmappings.html
- pointing out the 64bit instructions
- asking why they used isb's when neither the kernel or gcc use
them (answer the DMBs should
be fine as well, but there is some debate over which is
quicker, oh and DMBs are
converted to slower dsb's on most A9s due to an errata).
* Looking for docs on the non-core bits of current SoCs
* Extracting some denbench stats from a few months back for Ramana
About a day of non-Linaro IBM stuff.
Dave
RAG:
Red:
Amber:
Green:
NB: since qemu-linaro releases demonstrably go out on schedule
every month I'm dropping them from the milestone tables in these
reports, in favour of blueprint completion dates (usually they'll
be planned for dates coinciding with a qemu-linaro release).
Current Milestones:
|| || Planned || Estimate || Actual ||
||add-omap3-networking || 2011-10-13 || 2011-10-13 || ||
||a15-systemmode-planning || 2011-10-13 || 2011-10-13 || ||
||a15-usermode-support || 2011-11-10 || 2011-11-10 || ||
||upstream-omap3-cleanup || 2011-11-10 || 2011-11-10 || ||
Historical Milestones:
||qemu-linaro 2011-04 || 2011-04-21 || 2011-04-21 || 2011-04-21 ||
||qemu-linaro 2011-05 || 2011-05-19 || 2011-05-19 || n/a ||
||close out 1105 blueprints || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-19 ||
||complete 1111 planning || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-28 || 2011-05-27 ||
||qemu-linaro-2011-06 || 2011-06-16 || 2011-06-16 || 2011-06-16 ||
||qemu-linaro-2011-07 || 2011-07-21 || 2011-07-21 || 2011-07-21 ||
||qemu-linaro 2011-08 || 2011-08-18 || 2011-08-18 || 2011-08-18 ||
||qemu-linaro 2011-09 || 2011-09-15 || 2011-09-15 || 2011-09-15 ||
== linaro-qemu-11.11 ==
* completed this month's release
== add-omap3-networking ==
* investigated why qemu's usb-net model didn't work on the beagle;
this was due to a bug in the usb-ohci controller model; patches
sent upstream. Fix will go into qemu-linaro 2011-10.
== a15-system-mode-planning ==
* wrote up options and my suggestion on the wiki:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuA15
* just need to discuss with Michael and turn this into a roadmap entry
== a15-usermode-support ==
* complete but untested implementation of UDIV and SDIV
* fused multiply-accumulate: implemented decode, and the special-cases
parts of the softfloat implementation (NaN, inf, etc); the difficult
bit of actually implementing the operation remains
== other ==
* meetings: toolchain, pdsw doughnuts, AFDS
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences (to end of year):
Sep 19, Sep 29-Oct 07, Oct 17, Nov 21, Dec 15-Jan 03: leave
Oct 30-Nov 04: Linaro Connect Q4.11
As mentioned on the standup call this morning, I've been trying to get my head
around the way different parts of the toolchain using the config scripts and the
triplets. I'd appreciate some thoughts on what the right thing to do
is, especially
since there was some unease at some of the ideas.
My aim here is to add an armv7 specific set of routines to the eglibc
ports and get this picked up
only when eglibc is built for armv7; but it's getting a bit tricky.
eglibc shares with gcc and binutils a script called config.sub (that
lives in a separate repository)
which munges the triplet into a $basic_machine and validates it for a
set of known
triplets.
So for example it has the (shell) pattern:
arm | arm[bl]e | arme[lb] | armv[2345] | armv[345][lb]
to recognise triplets of the form arm- armbe- armle-
armel- armbe- armv5- armv5l- or armv5b-
It also knows more obscure things such as if you're configuring for
a netwinder it's an armv4l- system running linux - but frankly most
of that type of thing are a decade or two out of date. Note it doesn't
yet know about armv6 or armv7.
eglibc builds a search path that at the moment includes a path under
the 'ports' directory of the form
arm/eabi/$machine
where $machine is typically the first part of your triplet; however
at the moment eglibc doesn't have any ARM version specific subdirectories.
If I just added an ports/sysdeps/arm/eabi/armv7 directory it wouldn't
use it because
it searches in arm/eabi/arm if configured with the triplet arm-linux-gnueabi or
--with-cpu sets $submachine (NOT $machine) - so if you pass --with-cpu=armv7
it ends up searching
arm/eabi/arm/armv7
if you used the triplet arm-linux-gnueabi. If you had a triplet like
armel then I think
it would be searching
arm/eabi/armel/armv7
So my original patch (
http://old.nabble.com/-ARM--architecture-specific-subdirectories,-optimised…
)
did the following:
* Modified the paths searched to be arm/eabi (rather than arm/eabi/$machine)
* If $submachine hadn't been set by --with-cpu then autodetect it
from gcc's #defines
which meant that it ignored the start of the triplet and let you
specify --with-cpu=armv7
After some discussion with Joseph Myers, he's convinced me that isn't
what eglibc
is expecting (see later in the thread linked above); what it should
be doing is that
$machine should be armv7 and $submachine should be used if we wanted
say a cortex-a8 or
cortext-a9 specific version.
My current patch:
* adds armv6 and armv7 to config.sub
* adds arm/eabi/armv7 and arm/eabi/armv6t2 and one assembler
routine in there.
* If $machine is just 'arm' then it autodetects from gcc's #defines
* else if $machine is armv.... then that's still $machine
So if you use:
a triplet like arm-linux-gnueabi it looks at gcc and if that's configured
for armv7-a it searches arm/eabi/armv7
a triplet like armv7-linux-gnueabi then it searches arm/eabi/armv7
irrespective
of what gcc was configured for
a triplet like armv7-linux-gnueabi and --with-cpu=cortex-a9 then it searches
arm/eabi/armv7/cortex-a9 then arm/eabi/armv7
As far as I can tell gcc ignores the first part of the triplet, other than
noting it's arm and spotting if it ends with b for big endian; (i.e.
configuring gcc with armv4-linux-gnueabi and armv7-linux-gnueabi
ends up with the same compiler).
binutils also mostly ignores the 1st part of the triple - although is
a bit of a mess
with different parts parsing it differently (it seems to spot arm9e for some odd
reason); as far as I can tell gold will accept armbe* for big endian where as
ld takes arm*b !
If you're still reading, then the questions are:
1) Does the approach I've suggested make sense - in particular that the
machine directory chosen is based either on the triplet or where the triplet
doesn't specify the configuration of gcc; that's my interpretation of what
Joseph is suggesting.
2) Doing (1) would seem to suggest I should give config.sub armv6t2 and
some of the other complex names.
Dave
== This week ==
* Reviewed patches for the release.
* ...then broke the release. Tried to spin a new one.
* Worked on a "real" fix for bug 850099. Now in testing.
* Looked more at auto-inc-dec stuff. Saw a case that didn't behave
as I expected on the A9. The A9 TRM doesn't describe what happens
for post-indexed addressing, so I asked Ramana. Apparently the
behaviour is expected. Once I have more info, I'll try to update
the patches.
* Worked on neon-highlow-extract and neon-strided-load-extract.
Posted the three patches upstream. Nicely, the one I thought
was going to be the most controversial actually got positive
feedback from Paolo (who wrote the affected code).
Richard
== GDB ==
* Completed hardware watchpoint support for gdbserver.
* Tracked down watchpoint resource accounting regression
on GDB mainline (not present in 7.3).
* Created and published Linaro GDB 7.3-2011.09 release.
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
* Running SPEC2K on the Snowball board. A fresh kernel with HIGHMEM enabled
made it possible to run the tests. Great variations in the results indicates
that something strange is going on. Turning off one of the CPU:s gives
stable result (but slow), so my current guess is that the variations are
caused by a known bug that makes one cpu run slower.
http://igloocommunity.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=1
The patch for this bug was not included in my kernel. Will have another go
with a kernel where the patch is included, as a background activity.
* Planned and started working on the "Adding browsing benchmarks to our
current set of tests"-activity. I will try to keep documentation up to date
here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/AsaSandahl/Sandbox/BrowsingBenchmarks
Experimenting with building Firefox in different ways, so far for x86.
Best Regards
Åsa
(bouncing to linaro-dev as it's generally interesting)
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ramana Radhakrishnan
<ramana.radhakrishnan(a)linaro.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been looking at some of the perf regressions we've been seeing
> these days in an attempt to understand what's going on in these cases.
> While I can use perf and get more statistics and do other things to
> figure out why there are perf regressions between 2 binaries along
> with perf record and report, I wonder if it is possible to use u-boot
> to accurately measure what's going on. I would like to try and get the
> values of the performance counters between 2 program points .
>
> I am aware that there are patches that are floating around that allow
> users to set and reset the PMU counters by allowing user level access
> to it in the kernel : while that maybe useful to some I'm not sure if
> I want to take a chance with some other process getting scheduled that
> ends up getting scheduled. Even if there are parts of the kernel that
> save and restore PMU counters associated per process with across
> context switches . I'm looking for as accurate measurements as
> possible in this case and I wonder if u-boot is the best bet for this
> ( in the absence of any dedicated hardware debug / trace unit) given
> not all of us have one.
>
>
> At the minimum to do this I believe we require u-boot or some start-up code to:
>
> * Turn on i-cache and d-cache. ( The current u-boot for panda that I
> get from the linaro-uboot git repo
> git://git.linaro.org/boot/u-boot-linaro-stable.git says "Warning
> Caches turned off" when starting up ). Googling around I find a few
> patches floating around that turn on the d-cache in August from Aneesh
> at TI . We should consider getting these in at some point.
>
> * Looking in $(UBOOT_TOP)/examples/api I see that there are simple
> printf routines and simple stand-alone applications that exist which
> could be used for this purpose. The one problem with this is the fact
> that u-boot appears to require use of -ffixed-r8 for it's purposes
> which *might* mean we need these if we were to use API calls into
> standard u-boot functions .
I wonder if R8 is used in the current ARM version? There's no reason
we can't cherry pick parts such as the serial I/O out into a library
and make the app completely self contained. Skip all of the
initialisation stuff and assume the boot loader has done it for you.
> * Turn on / off speculative prefetching - I believe the kernel does
> this already for a few boards, but could this be done in u-boot just
> before it launches a test application ?
>
> * Turn on the VFP and Neon units.
>
> * Turn on unaligned access so that unaligned accesses are allowed in
> the test applications. GCC will now move towards generating unaligned
> accesses on versions of the architecture that support it, the patches
> upstream have now been approved.
>
> * Memory map / linker scripts to make sure we are putting things in
> the right places (sigh, has to be per-board).
But everything goes in RAM so you have one generic linker script and a
per board MEMORY definition. Similar to:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~stm32f-dev/stm32f-dev/stm32f-startup/view/head…
...but even lighter.
> We then write a set of library functions that could then look at what
> performance counters are of interest to us and track them by resetting
> them to 0 and making sure they haven't overflown.
>
> Has anyone else in the group played with u-boot before or has any
> thoughts in this direction ? I am not suggesting that we do this work
> right now but it sounds like an interesting thought of where we can
> get to with this.
My worry is that we miss turning on a feature and get results that
aren't representative. That should be easy enough to check by
baselineing against a Linux hosted run.
We can use NFS or kermit to load the programs. u-boot has a network
console which is nice when you don't have serial. This combined with
an expect script (or LAVA? Paul?) should automate the whole process.
-- Michael
