LICM will speculatively hoist code outside of loops. This requires removing information, like alias analysis (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/53794), range information (https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50550), among others. Prior to https://reviews.llvm.org/D99249 , LICM would only be run after LoopRotate. Running Loop Rotate prior to LICM prevents a instruction hoist from being speculative, if it was conditionally executed by the iteration (as is commonly emitted by clang and other frontends). Adding the additional LICM pass first, however, forces all of these instructions to be considered speculative, even if they are not speculative after LoopRotate. This destroys information, resulting in performance losses for discarding this additional information.
This PR modifies LICM to accept a ``speculative'' parameter which allows LICM to be set to perform information-loss speculative hoists or not. Phase ordering is then modified to not perform the information-losing speculative hoists until after loop rotate is performed, preserving this additional information.
Reviewed By: lebedev.ri
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D119965
This is one of those wonderful "in theory X doesn't matter, but in practice is does" changes. In this particular case, we shift the IVs inserted by the runtime unroller to clamp iteration count of the loops* from decrementing to incrementing.
Why does this matter? A couple of reasons:
* SCEV doesn't have a native subtract node. Instead, all subtracts (A - B) are represented as A + -1 * B and drops any flags invalidated by such. As a result, SCEV is slightly less good at reasoning about edge cases involving decrementing addrecs than incrementing ones. (You can see this in the inferred flags in some of the test cases.)
* Other parts of the optimizer produce incrementing IVs, and they're common in idiomatic source language. We do have support for reversing IVs, but in general if we produce one of each, the pair will persist surprisingly far through the optimizer before being coalesced. (You can see this looking at nearby phis in the test cases.)
Note that if the hardware prefers decrementing (i.e. zero tested) loops, LSR should convert back immediately before codegen.
* Mostly irrelevant detail: The main loop of the prolog case is handled independently and will simple use the original IV with a changed start value. We could in theory use this scheme for all iteration clamping, but that's a larger and more invasive change.
The unrolling code was previously inserting new cloned blocks at the end of the function. The result of this with typical loop structures is that the new iterations are placed far from the initial iteration.
With unrolling, the general assumption is that the a) the loop is reasonable hot, and b) the first Count-1 copies of the loop are rarely (if ever) loop exiting. As such, placing Count-1 copies out of line is a fairly poor code placement choice. We'd much rather fall through into the hot (non-exiting) path. For code with branch profiles, later layout would fix this, but this may have a positive impact on non-PGO compiled code.
However, the real motivation for this change isn't performance. Its readability and human understanding. Having to jump around long distances in an IR file to trace an unrolled loop structure is error prone and tedious.
Addition of this pass has been botched.
There is no particular reason why it had to be sold as an inseparable part
of new-pm transition. It was added when old-pm was still the default,
and very *very* few users were actually tracking new-pm,
so it's effects weren't measured.
Which means, some of the turnoil of the new-pm transition
are actually likely regressions due to this pass.
Likewise, there has been a number of post-commit feedback
(post new-pm switch), namely
* https://reviews.llvm.org/D37467#2787157 (regresses HW-loops)
* https://reviews.llvm.org/D37467#2787259 (should not be in middle-end, should run after LSR, not before)
* https://reviews.llvm.org/D95789 (an attempt to fix bad loop backedge metadata)
and in the half year past, the pass authors (google) still haven't found time to respond to any of that.
Hereby it is proposed to backout the pass from the pipeline,
until someone who cares about it can address the issues reported,
and properly start the process of adding a new pass into the pipeline,
with proper performance evaluation.
Furthermore, neither google nor facebook reports any perf changes
from this change, so i'm dropping the pass completely.
It can always be re-reverted should/if anyone want to pick it up again.
Reviewed By: aeubanks
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D104099
