llvm dev - Jan 2019 - [RFC] Allocatable Global Register Variables for ARM

Hi all,

This is a RFC on support for Global Register Variables in the Arm backend.

Whilst there has been some prior discussion about whether or not LLVM should (or
even needs to) support global register variables,
today there seems to be a good measure of support for this in both Clang+LLVM
(although it is currently limited to SP).
When most of this support landed there was some concern expressed around the
difficulty of extending it to cover allocatable registers.
We have been looking at building atop of this current support to provide that
ability to reserve allocatable registers.

Our primary (bare-metal) use-cases for such support are:

    1. Holding pointers for frequently-accessed data.
    2. Placement of secure values (e.g. checksums) in specific registers to
prevent them from being written out to main memory.

This proposal aims to provide support for using r4-r11 as global register
variables. This involves adding them to the reserved register set
and preventing them from being callee-saved. We have deliberately tried to avoid
registers that have a distinct ABI/AAPCS use,
such as call-clobbered registers, LR and PC etc. Naturally the current support
for the stack-pointer remains.

r7, r11 and r9 at least are special cases, and are mentioned in more detail
below.

Clang Changes
----------------------
The main proposed functional change to Clang is the tracking of global register
variable declarations via module flags.
Each declaration in a translation unit such as "register unsigned int foo
__asm("r4");", will be mapped by the front-end to a module flag.

e.g.
---
!{i32 1, !"fixed_reg.foo", !"r4"}
---

This is achieved via a modification to CodeGenModule::EmitGlobal. In addition,
there are some changes relating
to specifying valid global registers (by adding an Arm override for
isValidGlobalRegister),

Draft Patch: https://reviews.llvm.org/D56003

LLVM Changes
----------------------
In the LLVM backend we can then use the module flags to add any (valid)
specified global registers to the
reserved reg list (getReservedRegs). In addition, to satisfy the second
use-case*, we use the flags to remove
any (valid) global registers from the list of callee registers to be saved
(determineCalleeSaves).
This shouldn't have any negative impact on a register that is already
reserved for use.

GCC seems to exhibit similar behaviour:

    "If the register is a call-saved register, call ABI is affected: the
register will not be restored in function epilogue sequences after the variable
has been assigned."
        See:
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Global-Register-Variables.html#Global-Register-Variables

Draft Patch: https://reviews.llvm.org/D56005

A Note on r7, r11 and r9
----------------------------------
Whilst generally considered allocatable, these registers can on occasion be
reserved for other purposes.
As frame pointers, in the case of r7, and r11, and via -ffixed-r9 (or -frwpi),
in the case of r9.

The attached patches do not currently provide any mitigations against these
cases.
Options could range from disallowing these registers entirely, to throwing
warnings or
trying to catch and error in the correct scenarios (e.g. usage -ffixed-r9 when
r9 is declared as a global reg variable).

GCC's behaviour for many registers (at least notably, the call-clobbered
registers, e.g. r0-r3), is to throw a warning, rather than an error.

Other Notes
----------------------
- It's worth noting that we may also look into extending this to cover
AArch64 as well, in the near future.
- Extending this proposal to work with a -ffixed-reg option should be feasible
(if desired).
- GCC warns when two global variables refer to the same register - this
implementation silently accepts it.

Previous Patches/Discussion
------------------------------------------
- https://reviews.llvm.org/D3261
- https://reviews.llvm.org/D3797
- http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2014-March/071472.html

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On 12/21/2018 8:08 AM, Carey Williams via llvm-dev
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is a RFC on support for Global Register Variables in the Arm backend.
>
> Whilst there has been some prior discussion about whether or not LLVM 
> should (or even needs to) support global register variables,
> today there seems to be a good measure of support for this in both 
> Clang+LLVM (although it is currently limited to SP).
> When most of this support landed there was some concern expressed 
> around the difficulty of extending it to cover allocatable registers.
> We have been looking at building atop of this current support to 
> provide that ability to reserve allocatable registers.
>
> Our primary (bare-metal) use-cases for such support are:
>
>     1. Holding pointers for frequently-accessed data.
>     2. Placement of secure values (e.g. checksums) in specific 
> registers to prevent them from being written out to main memory.

As a side-note, you might want to check that prologue/epilogue emission 
won't emit a PUSH/POP that refers to a register reserved this way; we 
sometimes add an "extra" register to align the stack.

>
> This proposal aims to provide support for using r4-r11 as global 
> register variables. This involves adding them to the reserved register set
> and preventing them from being callee-saved. We have deliberately 
> tried to avoid registers that have a distinct ABI/AAPCS use,
> such as call-clobbered registers, LR and PC etc. Naturally the current 
> support for the stack-pointer remains.

Restricting this specifically to r4-r11 definitely makes sense; allowing 
other registers would be hard.

> r7, r11 and r9 at least are special cases, and are mentioned in more 
> detail below.
>
> Clang Changes
> ----------------------
> The main proposed functional change to Clang is the tracking of global 
> register variable declarations via module flags.
> Each declaration in a translation unit such as "register unsigned int 
> foo __asm("r4");", will be mapped by the front-end to a
module flag.
>
> e.g.
> ---
> !{i32 1, !"fixed_reg.foo", !"r4"}
> ---
>
> This is achieved via a modification to CodeGenModule::EmitGlobal. In 
> addition, there are some changes relating
> to specifying valid global registers (by adding an Arm override for 
> isValidGlobalRegister),
>
> Draft Patch: https://reviews.llvm.org/D56003 
> <https://reviews.llvm.org/D56003>

Why did you decide to use global metadata here?  For AArch64, we use a 
target feature instead, to implement roughly equivalent functionality 
(the reserve-x18 feature, to implement -ffixed-x18).


Making a global register declaration have side-effects never made sense, 
IMO; on the surface, it's using variable declaration syntax, but in 
reality it's actually changing the ABI rules for the whole file.  I 
would prefer to support -ffixed-r4, and never allow global register 
declarations to modify the ABI. This subset should be compatible with 
gcc, as far as I know.


(Compiler flags that affect the ABI are easy to misuse, but clang and 
gcc have a long tradition of flags which change the ABI, so it's not 
really worse than what we already do.)

>
> A Note on r7, r11 and r9
> ----------------------------------
> Whilst generally considered allocatable, these registers can on 
> occasion be reserved for other purposes.
> As frame pointers, in the case of r7, and r11, and via -ffixed-r9 (or 
> -frwpi), in the case of r9.
>
> The attached patches do not currently provide any mitigations against 
> these cases.
> Options could range from disallowing these registers entirely, to 
> throwing warnings or
> trying to catch and error in the correct scenarios (e.g. usage 
> -ffixed-r9 when r9 is declared as a global reg variable).

We probably want to emit an error here, to avoid confusion.


-Eli


-- 
Employee of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.
Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code Aurora Forum, a Linux
Foundation Collaborative Project

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Thank you for your reply Eli,

I too was working with Carey on this feature, so please let me reply.

On 12/21/18 8:05 PM, Friedman, Eli via llvm-dev wrote:
> As a side-note, you might want to check that prologue/epilogue emission
won't emit a PUSH/POP that refers to a register reserved this way; we
sometimes add an "extra" register to align the stack.
Yes, you are right.
Checking determineCalleeSaves(), we see that it maintains a number of free
Register pools, UnspilledCS1GPRs, UnspilledCS2GPRs and AvailableRegs, which are
used to find Registers that can be used for the extra callee saves you
mentioned.
There probably are more like this. Thanks for pointing that out.
We will investigate and extend our design.
>
> Why did you decide to use global metadata here?  For AArch64, we use a
target feature instead, to implement roughly equivalent functionality (the
reserve-x18 feature, to implement -ffixed-x18).
> Making a global register declaration have side-effects never made sense,
IMO; on the surface, it's using variable declaration syntax, but in reality
it's actually changing the ABI rules for the whole file.
> I would prefer to support -ffixed-r4, and never allow global register
declarations to modify the ABI. This subset should be compatible with gcc, as
far as I know.
>
> (Compiler flags that affect the ABI are easy to misuse, but clang and gcc
have a long tradition of flags which change the ABI, so it's not really
worse than what we already do.)
>
>
We were looking for a solution which works with LTO.
While we investigated a possible -ffixed-reg flag, our understanding was that it
would only work as long as it sets module metadata in the IR.
Adding a -ffixed-reg option in the LLVM backend, and adding that option to the
-cc1 command-line, would not work because that would not get passed through to
the backend when LTO is used. So our belief was that one could later implement
the -ffixed-reg flag upon the module metadata added by this patch.

Is this the target feature mechanism you explained?
https://llvm.org/docs/WritingAnLLVMBackend.html#subtarget-support
I still have not gone through the specifics of that but do you know if it would
work with LTO?

Thanks
Amilendra

From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> on behalf of Friedman,
Eli via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 8:05 PM
To: Carey Williams; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Cc: cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] [RFC] Allocatable Global Register Variables for ARM

On 12/21/2018 8:08 AM, Carey Williams via llvm-dev wrote:
Hi all,

This is a RFC on support for Global Register Variables in the Arm backend.

Whilst there has been some prior discussion about whether or not LLVM should (or
even needs to) support global register variables,
today there seems to be a good measure of support for this in both Clang+LLVM
(although it is currently limited to SP).
When most of this support landed there was some concern expressed around the
difficulty of extending it to cover allocatable registers.
We have been looking at building atop of this current support to provide that
ability to reserve allocatable registers.

Our primary (bare-metal) use-cases for such support are:

    1. Holding pointers for frequently-accessed data.
    2. Placement of secure values (e.g. checksums) in specific registers to
prevent them from being written out to main memory.


As a side-note, you might want to check that prologue/epilogue emission
won't emit a PUSH/POP that refers to a register reserved this way; we
sometimes add an "extra" register to align the stack.


This proposal aims to provide support for using r4-r11 as global register
variables. This involves adding them to the reserved register set
and preventing them from being callee-saved. We have deliberately tried to avoid
registers that have a distinct ABI/AAPCS use,
such as call-clobbered registers, LR and PC etc. Naturally the current support
for the stack-pointer remains.


Restricting this specifically to r4-r11 definitely makes sense; allowing other
registers would be hard.


r7, r11 and r9 at least are special cases, and are mentioned in more detail
below.

Clang Changes
----------------------
The main proposed functional change to Clang is the tracking of global register
variable declarations via module flags.
Each declaration in a translation unit such as "register unsigned int foo
__asm("r4");", will be mapped by the front-end to a module flag.

e.g.
---
!{i32 1, !"fixed_reg.foo", !"r4"}
---

This is achieved via a modification to CodeGenModule::EmitGlobal. In addition,
there are some changes relating
to specifying valid global registers (by adding an Arm override for
isValidGlobalRegister),

Draft Patch: https://reviews.llvm.org/D56003


Why did you decide to use global metadata here?  For AArch64, we use a target
feature instead, to implement roughly equivalent functionality (the reserve-x18
feature, to implement -ffixed-x18).


Making a global register declaration have side-effects never made sense, IMO; on
the surface, it's using variable declaration syntax, but in reality it's
actually changing the ABI rules for the whole file.  I would prefer to support
-ffixed-r4, and never allow global register declarations to modify the ABI. This
subset should be compatible with gcc, as far as I know.


(Compiler flags that affect the ABI are easy to misuse, but clang and gcc have a
long tradition of flags which change the ABI, so it's not really worse than
what we already do.)


A Note on r7, r11 and r9
----------------------------------
Whilst generally considered allocatable, these registers can on occasion be
reserved for other purposes.
As frame pointers, in the case of r7, and r11, and via -ffixed-r9 (or -frwpi),
in the case of r9.

The attached patches do not currently provide any mitigations against these
cases.
Options could range from disallowing these registers entirely, to throwing
warnings or
trying to catch and error in the correct scenarios (e.g. usage -ffixed-r9 when
r9 is declared as a global reg variable).


We probably want to emit an error here, to avoid confusion.


-Eli


--
Employee of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.
Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code Aurora Forum, a Linux
Foundation Collaborative Project

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are
confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient,
please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any
other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any
medium. Thank you.
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