[foreign] RFR - abi cleanup

Maurizio Cimadamore maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com
Wed Apr 17 17:11:28 UTC 2019


(Apologies for the lack of jbs issue, jbs seems to be down at the moment)

In the past few days I've been looking hard at ways to simplify the ABI 
code. This was something we needed to look at, after the Windows 
integration, which introduced a lot of duplicated code (and that was a 
deliberate choice, in order to minimize complexity). I think time has 
come to look at the impl again. I've consolidated the following areas:

* CallingSequence/CallingSequenceBuilder - now CallingSequenceBuilder is 
a proper abstract class, which is ABI agnostic, and can be used by a 
client to put together a calling sequence, given a 'Function'. This is 
perhaps the part of the code that has changed the most. Note that I've 
removed the split between Argument (ABI-independent) and ArgumentInfo 
(ABI-dependent); now ArgumentInfo *is a* Argument, which simplifies the 
builder flow significantly.

* Another area that has changed a lot is the logic for putting together 
ShuffleRecipe - there's now a new (and much simpler) builder. Again, the 
code removes many indirection, and it also fixes some of the issues in 
the old code, where, essentially, the recipe builder depended on 
physical details such as vector register size. One part that has changed 
a lot here is that I realized that many aspects of building a recipe 
were being done in different places - for instance, 
CallingSequenceBuilder added explicit 'skip' bindings to support shuffle 
recipe (but same skips were not generated for other argument classes). 
ShuffleRecipeCollector also added its own steps (through the addPulls 
method), and so did the logic that computed the final recipe array 
(which added a lot of 'STOP' steps). Now the steps are all computed 
before hand in  ShuffleRecipe::make, passed onto the builder which then 
puts together the array.

* CalingSequence has been simplified and all the logic for computing 
offsets have been moved to ShuffleRecipe, since this is where it really 
belongs (after all, you need this offset info only if you want to play 
with UniversalInvoker).

* UniversalNativeInvokerImpl and UniversalUpcallHandlerImpl are gone. 
Instead there's an helper interface called UniversalAdapter which 
defines how arguments are boxed/unboxed. The specific ABI will provide 
concrete implementation for these.

* VarargsInvoker has also changed - we used to intercept a vararg call, 
specialize everything then call ABI again to obtain another MH and then 
use that. The new code gives up on all that; whenever there's a variadic 
call, we infer layouts and carriers, create a new calling sequence and 
then just dispatch the call through a fresh UniversalInvoker instead. 
Some benchmarks I did with snprintf shows a speedup up to 3x with the 
new approach (also thanks to the streamlining of the logic surrounding 
the calling sequence creation). This new technique allowed me to also 
ditch the various 'impl' classes for VarargsInvoker.

* I removed the unused ShuffleRecipeFieldHelper, too

* I added a new test for 'unaligned' structs being passed as arguments. 
That is, I realized we never stressed the code path which took into 
account a mismatch between the alignment of an argument passed on the 
stack; the shuffle recipe should add one or more SKIP steps if extra 
padding is needed. Now, since layouts generated by jextract are really 
derived from clang, clang already inserts all the right amount of 
padding, so that, basically, the size of a layout is always a multiple 
of the layout natural alignment. To exercise this path I had to resort 
to manual layout annotations, use a `long double` (which unfortunately 
makes the test SysV dependent) to have an alignment of 16 and then 
omitted padding at the end, so that the ABI would run into troubles.


The end result of the cleanup is pleasing - to implement a new ABI, only 
two classes need to be tinkered with:

1) you need to implement the SystemABI interface (of course!)
2) you need to provide an implementation for CallingSequenceBuilder

Everything else should work (at least using the universal adapters).


Webrev:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mcimadamore/panama/abi-cleanup/

I tested on all platforms and results are all green.

Cheers
Maurizio



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