RFR: 8318446: C2: implement StoreNode::Ideal_merge_stores

[Emanuel Peter]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2023 13:04:35 GMT, Emanuel Peter <epeter at openjdk.org> wrote:

> This is a feature requiested by @RogerRiggs and @cl4es .
> 
> **Idea**
> 
> Merging multiple consecutive small stores (e.g. 8 byte stores) into larger stores (e.g. one long store) can lead to speedup. Recently, @cl4es and @RogerRiggs had to review a few PR's where people would try to get speedups by using Unsafe (e.g. `Unsafe.putLongUnaligned`), or ByteArrayLittleEndian (e.g. `ByteArrayLittleEndian.setLong`). They have asked if we can do such an optimization in C2, rather than in the Java library code, or even user code.
> 
> This patch here supports a few simple use-cases, like these:
> 
> Merge consecutive array stores, with constants. We can combine the separate constants into a larger constant:
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/test/hotspot/jtreg/compiler/c2/TestMergeStores.java#L383-L395
> 
> Merge consecutive array stores, with a variable that was split (using shifts). We can essentially undo the splitting (i.e. shifting and truncation), and directly store the variable:
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/test/hotspot/jtreg/compiler/c2/TestMergeStores.java#L444-L456
> 
> The idea is that this would allow the introduction of a very simple API, without any "heavy" dependencies (Unsafe or ByteArrayLittleEndian):
> 
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/test/hotspot/jtreg/compiler/c2/TestMergeStores.java#L327-L338
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/test/hotspot/jtreg/compiler/c2/TestMergeStores.java#L467-L472
> 
> **Details**
> 
> This draft currently implements the optimization in an additional special IGVN phase:
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/src/hotspot/share/opto/compile.cpp#L2479-L2485
> 
> We first collect all `StoreB|C|I`, and put them in the IGVN worklist (see `Compile::gather_nodes_for_merge_stores`). During IGVN, we call `StoreNode::Ideal_merge_stores` at the end (after all other optimizations) of `StoreNode::Ideal`. We essentially try to establish a chain of mergable stores:
> 
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/adca9e220822884d95d73c7f070adeee2632130d/src/hotspot/share/opto/memnode.cpp#L2802-L2806
> 
> Mergable stores must have the same Opcode (implies they have the same element type and hence size). Further, mergable stores must have the same control (or be separated by only a RangeCheck). Further, they must either both store constants, or adjacent segments of a larger value ...

So far, I just ignored the big-endian world completely. No testing machine I have access to has big-endian (except maybe SPARC if I were to dig that up). So I guess that has to be addressed. Does anybody have a way I can test for big-endian machines?

> Would this mean big-endian variants would not be candidates for this optimization?

@cl4es would you really write this with decreasing indices in java code? Or would you write it with increasing indices, but then flip around the bytes, probably shifting values differently?
I am considering to only enable this optimization on little-endian machines, and that will simplyfy my testing, and still apply basically everywhere we care for. Correct me if I should care about big-endian, please 😅

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/16245#issuecomment-1898488016