Re: Redundant constants in coremark crc8 for RISCV/aarch64 (no-if-conversion)

[Jeff Law <jeffreyalaw@gmail.com>]

On 10/14/22 09:56, Vineet Gupta wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When analyzing coremark build for RISC-V, noticed redundant constants 
> not being eliminated. While this is a recurrent issue with RV, this 
> specific instance is not unique to RV as I can trigger similar output 
> on aarch64 with -fno-if-conversion, hence something which could be 
> addressed in common passes.
>
> -O3 -march=rv64gc_zba_zbb_zbc_zbs
>
> crcu8:
>     xor    a3,a0,a1
>     andi    a3,a3,1
>     srli    a4,a0,1
>     srli    a5,a1,1
>     beq    a3,zero,.L2
>
>     li    a3,-24576    # 0xFFFF_A000
>     addi    a3,a3,1        # 0xFFFF_A001
>     xor    a5,a5,a3
>     zext.h    a5,a5
>
> .L2:
>     xor    a4,a4,a5
>     andi    a4,a4,1
>     srli    a3,a0,2
>     srli    a5,a5,1
>     beq    a4,zero,.L3
>
>     li    a4,-24576    # 0xFFFF_A000
>     addi    a4,a4,1        # 0xFFFF_A001
>     xor    a5,a5,a4
>     zext.h    a5,a5
>
> .L3:
>     xor    a3,a3,a5
>     andi    a3,a3,1
>     srli    a4,a0,3
>     srli    a5,a5,1
>     beq    a3,zero,.L4
>
>     li    a3,-24576    # 0xFFFF_A000
>     addi    a3,a3,1        # 0xFFFF_A001
> ...
> ...
>
> I see that with small tests cse1 is able to substitute redundant 
> constant reg with equivalent old reg.

I find it easier to reason about this stuff with a graphical CFG, so a 
bit of ascii art...


           2
         /    \
      3 ---> 4
              /    \
          5 --->  6


Where BB4 corresponds to .L2 and BB6 corresponds to .L3. Evaluation of 
the constants occurs in BB3 and BB5.

CSE isn't going to catch this.  The best way to think about CSE's 
capabilities is that it can work on extended basic blocks.     An 
extended basic block can have jumps out, but not jumps in.  There are 3 
EBBs in this code.  (1,2), (4,5) and 6.    So BB4 is in a different EBB 
than BB3.  So the evaluation in BB3 can't be used by CSE in the EBB 
containing BB4, BB5.


PRE/GCSE is better suited for this scenario, but it has a critical 
constraint.  In particular our PRE formulation is never allowed to put 
an evaluation of an expression on a path that didn't have one before.  
So while there clearly a redundancy on the path 2->3->4->5 (BB3 and 
BB5), there is nowhere we could put an evaluation that would reduce the 
number of evaluation on that path without introducing an evaluation on 
paths that didn't have one.  So consider 2->4->6.  On that path there 
are zero evaluations.  So we can't place an eval in BB2 because that 
will cause evaluations on 2->4->6 which didn't have any evaluations.

There isn't a great place in GCC to handle this right now.  If the 
constraints were relaxed in PRE, then we'd have a chance, but getting 
the cost model right is going to be tough.


Jeff