[Mesa-dev] r600g: status of my work on the shader optimization

[Christian König]

Am 15.02.2013 12:00, schrieb Vadim Girlin:
> On 02/14/2013 02:42 PM, Christian König wrote:
>> Hi Vadim,
>>
>> nice work, I think you've made quite a progress here, but on the other
>> hand it should be clear that the LLVM backend is the future and we
>> should concentrate on that.
>
> "LLVM backend is the future" is a pretty abstract argument. I prefer 
> to operate with real facts. After a year of LLVM backend development 
> what are the real benefits for the users? What are the real use cases 
> where the users might prefer LLVM backend? To me this situation looks 
> like the use of LLVM requires a lot more time and development efforts 
> than the custom solution, despite the initial expectations. Maybe you 
> are right and the LLVM backend will become the best alternative for 
> users sometime in the future, but I only have some today's results:
>
> Heaven 3.0, all settings high/enabled, 1280x720, HD5750:
>   default backend : 20.0 fps
>   llvm backend    : 18.8 fps
>   r600-sb         : 38.0 fps

Quite impressive. What's actually doing better than the LLVM backend?

>
>
> When I'm looking at these results, the benefits of LLVM-based solution 
> are not very clear to me.
>
> I'm not trying to persuade anyone, just wanted to explain why I 
> decided to switch back to work on the non-LLVM solution.
>
> Anyway, it's absolutely not a problem for me if this branch will never 
> make it to mesa, I was ready to this before I started. One of the 
> goals of this branch was just to show that the use of LLVM is possibly 
> not the the best way of the GL shaders compilation for r600g. And 
> another goal, of course, is to get better performance with r600g 
> *today*, not in the future.

Yeah, that's why I wrote I'm not sure what to do with it. On one hand 
it's a quite nice improvement that's already working and somewhat 
stable, one the other hand if we merge it we also need to support it. I 
suggest that you try to stabilize it a bit more first and then we see.

Christian.

>
> Vadim
>
>>
>> To sum it up I'm not sure what we should do with this branch :)
>>
>> As Dragomir already wrote even if the code won't be used much the
>> know-how you gained while coding it will stay, believe me that this is
>> or far more value than the code itself.
>>
>> Christian.
>>
>> Am 14.02.2013 11:10, schrieb Dragomir Ivanov:
>>> Greetings,
>>> I hope that, even if you work will be short-lived, e.g. until LLVM
>>> bytecode compiler takes off, the know-how is still very useful.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 4:04 AM, Vadim Girlin <vadimgirlin at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:vadimgirlin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Hi,
>>>
>>>     Last month I finally found the time to work on the rewrite of my
>>>     previous shader optimization branch, now it's mostly done in terms
>>>     of the correctness of produced code and feature support (at least
>>>     on evergreen), though it's still a work in progress in terms of
>>>     the efficiency of generated shader code and the efficiency of the
>>>     backend itself.
>>>
>>>     I spent some time last year studying the LLVM infrastructure and
>>>     R600 LLVM backend and trying to improve it, but after all I came
>>>     to the conclusion that for me it might be easier to implement all
>>>     that I wanted in the custom backend. This allows for more simple
>>>     and efficient implementation - e.g. I don't have to deal with CFGs
>>>     because in fact we have structured code, so it's possible to use
>>>     more simple and efficient algorithms.
>>>
>>>     Currently the branch has no regressions with piglit's
>>>     quick-driver.tests on evergreen (it doesn't rely on the fallback
>>>     to unoptimized code for the shaders with relative addressing and
>>>     other cases unlike the previous branch), and so far I don't see
>>>     any rendering issues with the apps that I used for testing -
>>>      Lightsmark 2008, Unigine Heaven 3.0 and some others.. There are
>>>     also some performance improvements with the gpu-bound apps.
>>>
>>>     I tried to keep in mind the differences between chip classes, so I
>>>     hope it should only require minor fixes to make it work on
>>>     non-evergreen chips, but I doubt that it will work out of the box
>>>     - support for some non-evergreen hw-specific features is still
>>>     missing, e.g. I'm sure that indirect addressing currently won't
>>>     work on R6xx, though basic tests might work in theory. Fixing this
>>>     shouldn't require a lot of work though.
>>>
>>>     The branch can be found in my freedesktop repo:
>>>
>>>     http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~vadimg/mesa/log/?h=r600-sb
>>> <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/%7Evadimg/mesa/log/?h=r600-sb>
>>>
>>>     Regarding the differences from the previous branch - there are
>>>     some additional optimizations, e.g. global value numbering with
>>>     some basic support for constant folding (not all instructions are
>>>     currently handled, but it's easy to extend), global code motion
>>>     that can hoist invariant code out of the loops etc. Some
>>>     optimizations that were implemented in the previous branch are not
>>>     implemented in the new branch (yet), e.g. propagation of modifiers
>>>     (I'm not even sure if it has any noticeable effect on performance).
>>>
>>>     Unlike the previous branch, there is support for indirect
>>>     addressing on registers -  currently it uses my previously posted
>>>     patch (that was not very welcome) for obtaining the information
>>>     about addressable register ranges, but it's not required and can
>>>     be dropped, I just used that patch for testing. Without that
>>>     information opportunities for optimization are limited though, and
>>>     perhaps it makes sense to not try to optimize the shaders with
>>>     indirect gpr addressing at all and rely on the old backend until
>>>     we'll have the proper solution to pass that information to the
>>>     drivers.
>>>
>>>     There is also initial support for ALU predication, but it's not
>>>     complete and currently unused, I'm not sure if predication support
>>>     will have significant effect on performance that will justify more
>>>     complex and expensive algorithms for register allocator and
>>>     scheduler, probably I'll look into it later, I consider this as a
>>>     low priority. In the case of predicated source code (from LLVM
>>>     backend) the predication is eliminated using speculative execution
>>>     and conditional moves, same as with the simple if-conversion pass
>>>     that is also implemented.
>>>
>>>     The branch currently uses as source the bytecode built by the old
>>>     backend (that may also come from LLVM backend) and some additional
>>>     information (about inputs etc), final bytecode is built by the new
>>>     builder in the branch. Building two versions of the bytecode
>>>     doesn't look very efficient, but currently it simplifies
>>>     debugging. I'm planning to implement translation from TGSI
>>>     directly to my representation, it should simplify the translator
>>>     and allow to get rid of unnecessary intermediate passes.
>>>
>>>     Some old and new environment variables can be used to control the
>>>     behavior of this backend:
>>>
>>>     R600_SB - 0 - disable new backend completely, 1 - enable (default)
>>>     R600_SB_USE_NEW_BYTECODE - 0 - disable use of the produced
>>>     bytecode (useful if you only want to look at the dump of the
>>>     optimized shader without passing it to hw), 1 - enable (default)
>>>     R600_DUMP_SHADERS - will also dump the dissasemble of the
>>>     optimized shader after original bytecode (if backend is not
>>>     disabled with R600_SB=0).
>>>
>>>     Produced shader code is not ideal - e.g. you may notice not very
>>>     necessary MOVs inserted before DOT4 instructions, it's a known
>>>     issue and I'm going to look into it - this may require rework of
>>>     the regalloc/scheduler. I had to sacrifice some features to make
>>>     it work correctly with Heaven first, so that now I can try to
>>>     improve it while being able to test for regressions.
>>>
>>>     Also probably there are some issues with the cleanness of the code
>>>     - I had to rework some parts a few times while fixing all
>>>     problems, so there is possibly unused code and other remnants of
>>>     the previous versions. Anyway, I still consider it as a work in
>>>     progress and some things are going to be reworked.
>>>
>>>     I'm not sure what will be the destiny of this branch, taking into
>>>     account that we also have actively developed LLVM backend that is
>>>     required for OpenCL anyway. Your opinions are welcome.
>>>
>>>     Vadim
>>>     _______________________________________________
>>>     mesa-dev mailing list
>>>     mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
>>> <mailto:mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org>
>>>     http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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