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

[Vineet Gupta <vineetg@rivosinc.com>]

On 10/18/22 16:36, Jeff Law wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> It would have been better (for this specific case) if loop unrolling 
>> was not being done so early. The tree pass cunroll is flattening it 
>> out and leaving for rest of the all tree/rtl passes to pick up the 
>> pieces and remove any redundancies, if at all. It obviously needs to 
>> be early if we are injecting 7x more instructions, but seems like a 
>> lot to unravel.
>
> Yup.  If that loop gets unrolled, it's going to be a mess.  It will 
> almost certainly make this problem worse as each iteration is going to 
> have a pair of constants loaded and no good way to remove them.

Thats the original problem that I started this thread with. I'd snipped 
the disassembly as it would have been too much text but basically on RV, 
Coremark crc8 loop of const 8 iterations gets unrolled including 
extraneous 8 insns pairs to load the same constant - which is 
preposterous. Other arches side-step by using if-conversion / cond 
moves, latter currently WIP in RV International. x86 w/o if-convert 
seems OK since the const can be encoded in the xor insn.

OTOH given that gimple/tree-pass cunroll is doing the culprit loop 
unrolling and introducing redundant const 8 times, can it ne addressed 
there somehow.
tree_estimate_loop_size() seems to identify constant expression, not 
just an operand. Can it be taught to identify a "non-trivial const" and 
hoist/code-move the expression. Sorry just rambling here, most likely 
non-sense.

>
>>
>> FWIW -fno-unroll-loops only seems to work at -O2. At -O3 it always 
>> unrolls. Is that expected ?
>
> The only case I'm immediately aware of where this wouldn't work would 
> be if -O3 came after -fno-unroll-oops.

Weird that gcc-12, gcc-11, gcc-10 all seem to be silently ignoring 
-funroll-loops despite following -O3. Perhaps a different toggle is 
needed to supress the issue.

Thx,
-Vineet