[Mesa-dev] Plan to work on opt_peephole_sel optimization for vec4

[Antía Puentes]

On lun, 2015-10-12 at 15:55 +0300, Francisco Jerez wrote:
> Antía Puentes <apuentes at igalia.com> writes:
> > On dom, 2015-10-11 at 10:35 -0700, Matt Turner wrote:
> >> I would expect big improvements in the vec4 backend from making its
> >> copy propagation pass global.
> >
> > I will be working on global copy propagation then.
> >
> 
> Heh...  I suggest you hold yourself from working on this for a while.
> 
> While working on some fragment discard improvements last week I noticed
> that a seemingly harmless change in the CFG could cause shitloads of
> shader-db regressions (>8k).  The reason is that a bunch of optimization
> passes of the compiler back-end are fully local (including VEC4 copy
> propagation) and become ineffective anytime your dataflow happens to
> traverse edges of the CFG.
> 
> Instead of reimplementing the intricate dataflow propagation logic (e.g.
> what fs_copy_prop_dataflow does) in every pass (or rather every pass
> that needs to consider two or more instructions at once), I've given a
> shot at implementing use-def chains in the back-end (didn't have a
> bigger hammer at hand).  Use-def chains should simplify this sort of
> optimization passes massively and allow them to work globally without
> any additional effort: Instead of looping back the instruction list to
> find out whether the last instruction that wrote a register had some
> specific form (c.f. cmod_propagation, saturate_propagation,
> compute_to_mrf, which are all local and have O(n^2) complexity), you
> just look-up the use entry for the instruction you're interested in and
> look at its immediate neighbours in the use-def graph, which represent
> the instruction(s) that generated the variable.
> 
> Use-def chains can be implemented trivially on an SSA IR so as an added
> benefit it should become easier to port optimization passes to SSA once
> they've been rewritten in terms of use-def chains.
> 
> I've got an algorithm to construct the use-def graph basically working
> on the FS back-end (I'm not sharing it publicly yet though because in
> its current form it would likely offend some people's sensibilities -- I
> could send you a branch in private though if you're interested).  I
> haven't started porting other optimization passes to use it yet, but
> it's next on my to-do list.

Hi Francisco,

that sounds great. Do you intend to do the same for vec4? Otherwise, I
can try to port your work to vec4 once you are done with FS.