Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 03/22] tcg-i386: Tidy ext8u and ext16u operations.

[Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 03:39:08PM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 11:31:27AM -0700, Richard Henderson wrote:
> > On 05/18/2010 11:47 PM, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > > The reg allocator is able to issue move if needed, so the only
> > > improvement this patch is for doing a ext8u on both "q" registers.
> > > 
> > > OTOH the reg allocator knows this situation and will try to avoid this
> > > situation during the allocation. Cheating on the reg allocator might
> > > have some wrong effects, especially after your patch "Allocate
> > > call-saved registers first". I am thinking of the scenario where the
> > > value is in memory (which is likely to be the case given the limited 
> > > number of registers), it will be likely loaded in a "r" register (they
> > > are now at the top priority), and then ext8u will be called, which will 
> > > issue "mov" + "and" instructions instead of a "movzbl" instruction.
> > 
> > The case I was concerned with is the fact that if we have a value
> > allocated to, say, %esi, and we need to to an ext8u, then the 
> > register allocator has been told that it must move the value to a
> > "q" register in order to perform the movzbl.  In this case, the
> > new code will simply emit the andl.
> > 
> > I.e. the real problem is that we've told the register allocator
> > one way that the extend can be implemented, but not every way.
> > 
> > > All of that is purely theoretical. Do you know how does it behave in 
> > > practice?
> > 
> > Picking the i386 target since it seems to use more extensions than
> > any other target, from linux-user-test -d op_opt,out_asm i386/ls:
> > 
> > There are 176 instances of ext8u.
> > Of those, 83 instances are in-place, i.e. "ext8u_i32 tmp0,tmp0"
> > 
> > I examined the first 2 dozen appearances in the output assembly:
> > 
> > There are several instances of the value being in an "r" register:
> > 
> >  shr_i32 tmp1,edx,tmp13
> >  ext8u_i32 tmp1,tmp1
> >  =>
> > 0x601c5468:  shr    $0x8,%edi
> > 0x601c546b:  and    $0xff,%edi
> > 
> > All of the instances that I looked at that were not in-place happened
> > to already be using a "q" register -- usually %ebx.  I assume that's
> > because we place %ebx as the first allocation register and that's just
> > how things happen to work out once we've flushed the registers before
> > the qemu_ld.
> > 
> >  qemu_ld8u tmp0,tmp2,$0xffffffff
> >  ext8u_i32 tmp13,tmp0
> >  =>
> > 0x601c82f9:  movzbl (%esi),%ebx
> > 0x601c82fc:  movzbl %bl,%ebx
> > 
> 
> Do you have tried to compare the generated code before and after your
> patch? I expect a few cases where your patch has some drawbacks, so I
> don't know if there is a net gain on the size of the translated code.
> 

I have done a quick test on /bin/ls. 
       |  instr |  size  |
       +--------+--------+
before | 101305 | 344770 |
after  | 101258 | 344829 |

In short a small gain in the number of instructions, and a small loss in
the size of the translated code.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net