From: Stefan Israelsson Tampe <stefan.itampe@gmail.com>
To: "Sjoerd van Leent Privé" <svanleent@gmail.com>
Cc: guile-devel <guile-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: thoughts on native code
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:13:04 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAGua6m0JWoanf7SyGa_uzwmkF0Ex9u09kKSgT6HmVfmKrKUv4A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <50A4C19A.3030907@gmail.com>
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Arg, I prematurely send that mail, well here is the continuation
4. I prefere to have an evironment like
(assemble target
(inst jmp label:)
(inst mov b a)
label:
(inst mov b c)
This makes the labels stand out and makes for a nice read of the assembler.
You can see how weinholt in industria solves the assembling issue, also MIT
Scheme as an assembler that you can learn from, I was not liking the syntax
of that one though, but You maybe can port that over to guile, this is GNU
and may
be the shortest path to success.
I like the environment in the sbcl assembler, I ported that over in the
aschm repo and you can see a lot of assembler
in the nativ/vm/insts.scm file in that repo on gitorious. We cannot use
that one due to the fact that it's not GNU although
it's open source and the code is somewhat unclean.
It would also be nice if we could concentrate on a restricted set of
instruction support from the beginning and make sure to support more
architectures instead.
What do you think?
/Stefan
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Sjoerd van Leent Privé <
svanleent@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
>
> Just my idea about an assembler in Scheme. Sounds interesting. If it's
> done properly, it can be very promising to use scheme itself to directly
> emit machine instructions. This would also be interesting for meta
> compilation in the future (think of aiding GCC).
>
> So you are thinking about an assembler for x86? Perhaps I can help out on
> this one. I would like to do this part, as I haven't been able to aid on
> other parts besides voicing my ideas (anyways, I am on embedded development
> these days.)
>
> The only discussion is the syntax I believe, I mean, should it be AT&T
> like, Intel like, or leave this domain and do something new. I would go for
> instructions like this (using macros):
>
> (let ((target :x686))
> (assemble target
> ((mov long 100 EAX)
> (mov long 200 EBX)
> (add long EBX EAX))))
>
> Giving back the native machine code instructions. Perhaps special
> constructions can be made to return partially complete instructions (such
> as missing labels or calls to guile procedures...)
>
> Sjoerd
>
>
>
> On 11/12/2012 10:50 PM, Stefan Israelsson Tampe wrote:
>
> Thanks for your mail Noah,
>
> Yea libjit is quite interesting. But playing around with an assembler in
> scheme I do not want to go back to
> C or C++ land. The only problem is that we need a GNU scheme assembler and
> right now I use sbcl's assembler
> ported to scheme. We could perhaps use weinholts assembler as well in
> industria if he could sign papers to make it GNU. For the register
> allocation part I would really like to play a little in scheme to explore
> the idea you saw from my previous mail in this thread. Again I think it's
> natural to have this features in scheme and do not want to mess in C land
> too much.
>
> Am I wrong?
>
> Cheers
> Stefan
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 11:49 PM, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I assume "compressed native" is the idea you wrote about in your last
>> email, where we generate native code which is a sequence of function calls
>> to VM operations.
>>
>> I really like that idea. As you said, it uses the instruction cache
>> better. But it also fixes something I was worried about, which is that it's
>> a lot of work to port an assembler to a new architecture, so we might end
>> up not supporting many native architectures. But it seems much easier to
>> make an assembler that only knows how to make call instructions and
>> branches. So we could support compressed native on lots of architectures,
>> and maybe uncompressed native only on some.
>>
>> If you want a quick way to do compressed native with reasonable
>> register allocation, GNU libjit might work. I used it a couple years ago
>> for a JIT project that we never fully implemented. I chose it over GNU
>> Lightning specifically because it did register allocation. It implements a
>> full assembler, not just calls, which could also be nice later.
>>
>> Noah
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Stefan Israelsson Tampe <
>> stefan.itampe@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I would like to continue the discussion about native code.
>>>
>>> Some facts are,
>>> For example, consider this
>>> (define (f x) (let loop ((s 0) (i 0)) (if (eq? i x) s (loop (+ s i) (+ i
>>> 1)))))
>>>
>>> The timings for (f 100000000) ~ (f 100M) is
>>>
>>> 1) current vm : 2.93s
>>> 2) rtl : 1.67s
>>> 3) compressed native : 1.15s
>>> 4) uncompressed native : 0.54s
>>>
>>> sbcl = compressed nativ + better register allocations (normal
>>> optimization level) : 0.68s
>>>
>>> To note is that for this example the call overhead is close to 5ns per
>>> iteration and meaning that
>>> if we combined 4 with better register handling the potential is to get
>>> this loop to run at 0.2s which means
>>> that the loop has the potential of running 500M iterations in one second
>>> without sacrifying safety and not
>>> have a extraterestial code analyzer. Also to note is that the native
>>> code for the compressed native is smaller then the
>>> rtl code by some factor and if we could make use of registers in a
>>> better way we would end up with even less overhead.
>>>
>>> To note is that compressed native is a very simple mechanism to gain
>>> some speed and also improve on memory
>>> usage in the instruction flow, Also the assembler is very simplistic and
>>> it would not be to much hassle to port a new
>>> instruction format to that environment. Also it's probably possible to
>>> handle the complexity of the code in pure C
>>> for the stubs and by compiling them in a special way make sure they
>>> output a format that can be combined
>>> with the meta information in special registers needed to make the
>>> execution of the compiled scheme effective.
>>>
>>> This study also shows that there is a clear benefit to be able to use
>>> the computers registers, and I think this is the way
>>> you would like the system to behave in the end. sbcl does this rather
>>> nicely and we could look at their way of doing it.
>>>
>>> So, the main question now to you is how to implement the register
>>> allocations? Basic principles of register allocation can be gotten out from
>>> the internet, I'm assure of, but the problem is how to handle the
>>> interaction with the helper stubs. That is
>>> something i'm not sure of yet.
>>>
>>> A simple solution would be to assume that the native code have a set of
>>> available registers r1,...,ri and then force the
>>> compilation of the stubs to treat the just like the registers bp, sp,
>>> and bx. I'm sure that this is possible to configure in gcc.
>>>
>>> So the task for me right now is to find out more how to do this, if you
>>> have any pointers or ideas, please help out.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Stefan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 3:41 PM, Stefan Israelsson Tampe <
>>> stefan.itampe@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> After talking with Mark Weaver about his view on native code, I have
>>>> been pondering how to best model our needs.
>>>>
>>>> I do have a framework now that translates almost all of the rtl vm
>>>> directly to native code and it do shows a speed increase of say 4x compared
>>>> to runing a rtl VM. I can also generate rtl code all the way from guile
>>>> scheme right now so It's pretty easy to generate test cases. The problem
>>>> that Mark point out to is that we need to take care to not blow the
>>>> instructuction cache. This is not seen in these simple examples but we need
>>>> larger code bases to test out what is actually true. What we can note
>>>> though is that I expect the size of the code to blow up with a factor of
>>>> around 10 compared to the instruction feed in the rtl code.
>>>>
>>>> One interesting fact is that SBCL does fairly well by basically using
>>>> the native instruction as the instruction flow to it's VM. For example if
>>>> it can deduce that a + operation works with fixnums it simply compiles that
>>>> as a function call to a general + routine e.g. it will do a long jump to
>>>> the + routine, do the plus, and longjump back essentially dispatching
>>>> general instructions like + * / etc, directly e.g. sbcl do have a virtual
>>>> machine, it just don't to table lookup to do the dispatch, but function
>>>> call's in stead. If you count longjumps this means that the number of jumps
>>>> for these instructions are double that of using the original table lookup
>>>> methods. But for calling functions and returning functions the number of
>>>> longjumps are the same and moving local variables in place , jumping is
>>>> really fast.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, this method of dispatching would mean a fairly small footprint
>>>> with respect to the direct assembler. Another big chunk of code that we can
>>>> speedup without to much bloat in the instruction cache is the lookup of
>>>> pairs, structs and arrays, the reason is that in many cases we can deduce
>>>> at compilation so much that we do not need to check the type all the time
>>>> but can safely lookup the needed infromation.
>>>>
>>>> Now is this method fast? well, looking a the sbcl code for calculating
>>>> 1+ 2 + 3 + 4 , (disassembling it) I see that it do uses the mechanism
>>>> above, it manages to sum 150M terms in one second, that's quite a feat for
>>>> a VM with no JIT. The same with the rtl VM is 65M.
>>>>
>>>> Now, sbcl's compiler is quite matured and uses native registers quite
>>>> well which explains one of the reasons why the speed. My point is though
>>>> that we can model efficiently a VM by call's and using the native
>>>> instructions and a instructions flow.
>>>>
>>>> Regards Stefan
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-11-15 16:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-11-10 14:41 thoughts on native code Stefan Israelsson Tampe
2012-11-10 22:06 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe
2012-11-10 22:49 ` Noah Lavine
2012-11-12 21:50 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe
2012-11-15 10:19 ` Sjoerd van Leent Privé
2012-11-15 16:04 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe
2012-11-15 16:13 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe [this message]
2012-11-15 17:50 ` Mark H Weaver
2012-11-15 18:03 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe
2012-11-15 20:30 ` Ludovic Courtès
2012-11-15 22:44 ` Andreas Rottmann
2012-11-11 19:28 ` Stefan Israelsson Tampe
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