[External] : Re: Question about RegMask::is_aligned_sets()

Corey Ashford cjashfor at linux.ibm.com
Thu Mar 11 22:08:50 UTC 2021


Thanks for your reply, Vladimir.  A few more questions below when you 
have the chance :)

On 3/11/21 12:10 AM, Vladimir Ivanov wrote:
> 
> 
> On 11.03.2021 06:13, Corey Ashford wrote:
>> Hello Vladimir,
>>
>> Currently I'm looking at the register mask defined for the Power64-LE 
>> machine.  There are 64 128-bit registers defined via reg_def, e.g.:
>>
>> reg_def VSR25 ( SOC, SOC, Op_VecX, 25, NULL);
>>
>> But only the 20 of those vector registers that are declared as part of 
>> "reg_class vs_reg( ... )" end up with a mask in the generated 
>> ad_ppc_expand.cpp source file, and further, each of those registers is 
>> allocated just a single bit in the register mask:
>>
>> const RegMask _VS_REG_mask( 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xfffff00, 0x0, 
>> 0x0, 0x0, 0x0 );
>>
>> I would have expected that since Op_VecX is a 128-bit type, it would 
>> have received four bits per register in the mask.
>>
>>
>> On x86, each of the 512-bit vector registers is declared using 16 
>> Op_RegF register declarations (which makes sense - 16 x 32 = 512), but 
>> on aarch64, which can have up to a 1024-bit vector register, vector 
>> registers are declared using just 8 x Op_RegF (8 x 32 = 256 bits). 
>> There is an extensive comment in the aarch64.ad about this, but it 
>> seems to imply that the 32-bits-per-slot rule is not rigid (just as on 
>> PPC64)
> 
> As you noted, there's no relation between register mask (1 slot per 
> register definition) and ideal register (VecX et al) chosed. You had to 
> declare as many registers as there are slots in the value to get it 
> working.

So we should be declaring four register slots per vector register, 
instead of one, right?  I'm a bit worried as to that screwing up the 
existing implementation for vector register allocation.  I will 
experiment to see what happens.

> But, as part of SVE support, Arm came up with special VecA 
> ideal register which represents a variable-length vector >
> Considering what you wrote about Power64-LE, I'd avoid VecA and just 
> provide additional register definitions.
> 
>> As to your comment about not needing to use a vector register for the 
>> boolean vectors, that's quite interesting.  So for all vector types 
>> except for tiny integers, I should be able to use a 64-bit bit general 
>> purpose register.  I'm very new to all of this that I'm not clear how 
>> easy it will be to mix and match register types like this, but I will 
>> start experimenting with the idea.
> 
> Can you elaborate how masks are represented in Power64-LE ISA?
> 

There are no special mask/predicate registers.  Masking is done via the 
uppermost bit of each corresponding element in a vector register (the 
other bits are ignored).  Conversion from an array of boolean bytes of 
0|1 is simple: the boolean bytes of the mask are first shuffled (via the 
vperm instr. on ppc64) into each element, then arithmetically negated, 
producing 0|-1, which means either all 0's or all 1's in each element, 
which effectively sets or clears the upper bit as desired.


> If there are special predicate registers, then you can rely on what 
> Intel and Arm folks are working on for AVX-512 and SVE support.
> 
> On x86 AVX/AVX2 ISA, masks occupy wide vector register. So, a mask of 4 
> elements for vector of ints (128-bit) ocupies 128-bit vector. And, 
> currently, ideal vector nodes follow that representation: mask has the 
> same ideal type as the value it is applied to (e.g., vectorx[4]{int} and 
> not a vector of 4 booleans).

The mask is represented in Java is as a byte array, so there has to be a 
conversion from the byte array in memory to a vector mask (in this case 
a VecX). So it seems that conversion can done "locally" within node 
matching code in ppc.ad, and that the mask representation isn't ever 
seen as a different type for operand matching.  If that's the case, the 
fog is lifting a little.

Thank you,

- Corey
> 
> Best regards,
> Vladimir Ivanov
> 
> 
>> On 3/5/21 3:19 PM, Vladimir Ivanov wrote:
>>> Hi Corey,
>>>
>>>> I'd like to understand the concept of "aligned sets" in RegMask.  I 
>>>> believe I understand the RegMask idea overall, but I don't 
>>>> understand the idea of alignment of sets (actually the concept of 
>>>> sets in this context is also fuzzy).  I've looked at the code that 
>>>> implements is_aligned_sets, and I just can't yet seem to grok what 
>>>> requirement it is trying to verify.  I read RegMask.hpp's comments 
>>>> on the method protoype, and it didn't help me much, I'm afraid.  If 
>>>> someone could give a paragraph or two of explanation, I'd really 
>>>> appreciate it.
>>>
>>> A register in RegMask is comprised of packed bits each representing a 
>>> 32-bit slot. So, a VecX register occupies 4 bits (128 = 4 x 32) while 
>>> VecZ needs 16 (512 = 16 x 32).
>>>
>>> Some code relies on the alignment when recovering base register from 
>>> VMReg:
>>>
>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/e1cad97049642ab201d53ff608937f7e7ef3ff3e/src/hotspot/cpu/x86/registerMap_x86.cpp*L29__;Iw!!GqivPVa7Brio!ONsyUV4W1ucXIXrwfbZN_XYI2Q8iF0_VwN44U7AfWOKj6jGzA9o19MVhnSL9h4n4MN_Kgz0$ 
>>>
>>>
>>> src/hotspot/cpu/x86/registerMap_x86.cpp
>>>
>>>      29 address RegisterMap::pd_location(VMReg reg) const {
>>>      30   if (reg->is_XMMRegister()) {
>>>      31     int reg_base = reg->value() - ConcreteRegisterImpl::max_fpr;
>>>      32     int base_reg_enc = (reg_base / 
>>> XMMRegisterImpl::max_slots_per_register);
>>>      33     assert(base_reg_enc >= 0 && base_reg_enc < 
>>> XMMRegisterImpl::number_of_registers, "invalid XMMRegister: %d", 
>>> base_reg_enc);
>>>      34     VMReg base_reg = as_XMMRegister(base_reg_enc)->as_VMReg();
>>>
>>>> We have started working on adding support to the PPC64-LE hotspot 
>>>> code for the Vector API.  In order to support Vector Masks, it seems 
>>>> we need to change our current support for fixed-length, 128-bit 
>>>> vectors to something that can be as short as two booleans.  To do 
>>>> that we have changed the function min_vector_size in 
>>>> hotspot/cpu/ppc.ad to return 2 when the type is T_BOOLEAN, otherwise 
>>>> it still returns 16.
>>>>
>>>> My first task was to add support for vector masks, and so I added a 
>>>> new instruct to cpu/ppc/ppc.ad to match VectorLoadMask, which then 
>>>> necessitated adding some instructs for LoadVector and StoreVector of 
>>>> the appropriate lengths.
>>>
>>> I don't know much about PPC64-LE, but you don't have to use boolean 
>>> vectors. FTR masks have the same type as the vectors they are applied 
>>> to. Until recently (when work on predicated registers started), it 
>>> was the only mask representation in Ideal IR.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Vladimir Ivanov
>>>
>>>> I have a test case that loads a vector mask for a vector of shorts:
>>>>
>>>> import jdk.incubator.vector.ShortVector;
>>>> import jdk.incubator.vector.VectorSpecies;
>>>> import jdk.incubator.vector.VectorMask;
>>>> import java.util.Random;
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> class TestVectorMaskShort {
>>>>    private static final VectorSpecies<Short> SPECIES = 
>>>> ShortVector.SPECIES_128;
>>>>
>>>>    public static VectorMask<Short> test(boolean[] bary) {
>>>>        VectorMask<Short> vmask = VectorMask.fromArray(SPECIES, bary, 
>>>> 0);
>>>>        return vmask;
>>>>    }
>>>>
>>>>    public static void main(String args[]) {
>>>>      Random ran = new Random(100);
>>>>      int counter = 0;
>>>>      boolean[] bary = new boolean[8];
>>>>      for (int i = 0; i < 20_000; i++) {
>>>>        for (int j = 0; j < bary.length; j++) {
>>>>          bary[j] = ran.nextBoolean();
>>>>        }
>>>>        VectorMask<Short> vmask = test(bary);
>>>>        if (vmask.allTrue()) {
>>>>          counter++;
>>>>        }
>>>>      }
>>>>      System.out.printf("counter = %d\n", counter);
>>>>    }
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> When I run this test case, I get a runtime error:
>>>>
>>>> #  Internal Error 
>>>> (/home/cjashfor/git-trees/jdk/src/hotspot/share/opto/chaitin.cpp:951), 
>>>> pid=1341588, tid=1341601
>>>> #  assert(lrgmask.is_aligned_sets(RegMask::SlotsPerVecX)) failed: 
>>>> vector should be aligned
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> - Corey
>>>>
>>>> Corey Ashford
>>>> Software Engineer
>>>> IBM Systems, LTC OpenJDK team
>>>>
>>>> IBM


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