RFR: 8335392: C2 MergeStores: enhanced pointer parsing

Emanuel Peter epeter at openjdk.org
Mon Nov 4 12:23:38 UTC 2024


On Thu, 17 Oct 2024 21:42:33 GMT, Vladimir Kozlov <kvn at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> **Background**
>> I am introducing the `MemPointer`, for enhanced pointer parsing. For now, it replaces the much more limited `ArrayPointer` in `MergeStores` (see https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/16245), but eventually it is supposed to be used widely in optimizations for pointer analysis: adjacency, aliasing, etc. I also plan to refactor the `VPointer` from auto-vectorization with it, and unlock more pointer patterns that way - possibly including scatter/gather.
>> 
>> **Details**
>> 
>> The `MemPointer` decomposes a pointer into the form `pointer = con + sum_i(scale_i * variable_i)` - a linear form with a sum of variables and scale-coefficients, plus some constant offset.
>> 
>> This form allows us to perform aliasing checks - basically we can check if two pointers are always at a constant offset. This allows us to answer many questions, including if two pointers are adjacent. `MergeStores` needs to know if two stores are adjacent, so that we can safely merge them.
>> 
>> More details can be found in the description in `mempointer.hpp`. Please read them when reviewing!
>> 
>> `MemPointer` is more powerful than the previous `ArrayPointer`: the latter only allows arrays, the former also allows native memory accesses, `Unsafe` and `MemorySegement`.
>> 
>> **What this change enables**
>> 
>> Before this change, we only allowed merging stores to arrays, where the store had to have the same type as the array element (`StoreB` on `byte[]`, `StoreI` on `int[]`).
>> 
>> Now we can do:
>> - Merging `Unsafe` stores to array. Including "mismatched size": e.g. `putChar` to `byte[]`.
>> - Merging `Unsafe` stores to native memory.
>> - Merging `MemorySegment`: with array, native, ByteBuffer backing types.
>>   - However: there is still some problem with RangeCheck smearing (a type of RC elimination) for the examples I have tried. Without RC's smeared, we can only ever merge 2 neighbouring stores. I hope we can improve this with better RangeCheck smearing. `MemorySegment` introduce `checkIndexL`, the long-variant of the RangeCheck. Normal array accesses only use the equivalent of `checkIndex`, the int-variant that we already optimize away much better.
>> 
>> **Dealing with Overflows**
>> 
>> We have to be very careful with overflows when dealing with pointers. For this, I introduced a `NoOverflowInt`. It allows us to do "normal" int operations on it, and tracks if there was ever an overflow. This way, we can do all overflow checks implicitly, and do not clutter the code with overflow-check...
>
> For me it is confusing to call `pointer = con + sum_i(scale_i * variable_i)` as "pointer" unless it is Unsafe address which has base address as constant.  It misses base address. All out pointer types are correspond to an address of some object in Java heap, out of heap, VM's object or some native (C heap) VM object.
> This looks like `address_offset`, `displacement`, ...

@vnkozlov Would you like to re-review? If I don't hear anything then I'll integrate tomorrow.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/19970#issuecomment-2454574537


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