Message-ID: <YXKVLtT2U2g3JDrm@bruce.bluespec.com>
Date:   Fri, 22 Oct 2021 06:40:46 -0400
From:   Darius Rad <darius@...espec.com>
To:     Vincent Chen <vincent.chen@...ive.com>
Cc:     Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@...ive.com>,
        Greentime Hu <greentime.hu@...ive.com>,
        linux-riscv <linux-riscv@...ts.infradead.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Albert Ou <aou@...s.berkeley.edu>,
        Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@...belt.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v8 09/21] riscv: Add task switch support for vector

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 11:52:01AM +0800, Vincent Chen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 6:50 PM Darius Rad <darius@...espec.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 06:01:31PM -0700, Paul Walmsley wrote:
> > > Hello Darius,
> > >
> > > On Tue, 5 Oct 2021, Darius Rad wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 08:36:30PM +0800, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > > > > Darius Rad <darius@...espec.com> 於 2021年9月29日 週三 下午9:28寫道：
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 10:56:52PM +0800, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > > > > > > Darius Rad <darius@...espec.com> 於 2021年9月13日 週一 下午8:21寫道：
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > On 9/8/21 1:45 PM, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > > > > > > > > This patch adds task switch support for vector. It supports partial lazy
> > > > > > > > > save and restore mechanism. It also supports all lengths of vlen.
> > >
> > > [ ... ]
> > >
> > > > > > > > So this will unconditionally enable vector instructions, and allocate
> > > > > > > > memory for vector state, for all processes, regardless of whether vector
> > > > > > > > instructions are used?
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Yes, it will enable vector if has_vector() is true. The reason that we
> > > > > > > choose to enable and allocate memory for user space program is because
> > > > > > > we also implement some common functions in the glibc such as memcpy
> > > > > > > vector version and it is called very often by every process. So that
> > > > > > > we assume if the user program is running in a CPU with vector ISA
> > > > > > > would like to use vector by default. If we disable it by default and
> > > > > > > make it trigger the illegal instruction, that might be a burden since
> > > > > > > almost every process will use vector glibc memcpy or something like
> > > > > > > that.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that almost every process
> > > > > > would use vector operations?  One could easily argue that the converse is
> > > > > > true: no existing software uses the vector extension now, so most likely a
> > > > > > process will not be using it.
> > > > >
> > > > > Glibc ustreaming is just starting so you didn't see software using the
> > > > > vector extension now and this patchset is testing based on those
> > > > > optimized glibc too. Vincent Chen is working on the glibc vector
> > > > > support upstreaming and we will also upstream the vector version glibc
> > > > > memcpy, memcmp, memchr, memmove, memset, strcmp, strlen. Then we will
> > > > > see platform with vector support can use vector version mem* and str*
> > > > > functions automatically based on ifunc and platform without vector
> > > > > will use the original one automatically. These could be done to select
> > > > > the correct optimized glibc functions by ifunc mechanism.
> > >
> > > In your reply, I noticed that you didn't address Greentime's response
> > > here.  But this looks like the key issue.  If common library functions are
> > > vector-accelerated, wouldn't it make sense that almost every process would
> > > wind up using vector instructions?  And thus there wouldn't be much point
> > > to skipping the vector context memory allocation?
> > >
> >
> > This issue was addressed in the thread regarding Intel AMX I linked to in a
> > previous message.  I don't agree that this is the key issue; it is one of a
> > number of issues.  What if I don't want to take the potential
> > power/frequency hit for the vector unit for a workload that, at best, uses
> > it for the occasional memcpy?  What if the allocation fails, how will that
> 
> Hi Darius,
> The memcpy function seems not to be occasionally used in the programs
> because many functions in Glibc use memcpy() to complete the memory
> copy. I use the following simple case as an example.
> test.c
> void main(void) {
>     return;
> }
> Then, we compile it by "gcc test.c -o a.out" and execute it. In the
> execution, the memcpy() has been called unexpectedly. It is because
> many libc initialized functions will be executed before entering the
> user-defined main function. One of the example is __libc_setup_tls(),
> which is called by __libc_start_main(). The __libc_setup_tls() will
> use memcpy() during the process of creating the Dynamic Thread Vector
> (DTV).
> 
> Therefore, I think the memcpy() is widely used in most programs.
> 

You're missing my point.  Not every (any?) program spends a majority of the
time doing memcpy(), and even if a program did, all of my points are still
valid.

Please read the discussion in the thread I referenced and the questions in
my prior message.

> > get reported to user space (hint: not well)?  According to Greentime,
> > RISC-V vector is similar to ARM SVE, which allocates memory for context
> > state on first use and not unconditionally for all processes.
> >

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