llvm dev - Oct 2019 - Shift-by-signext - sext is bad for analysis - ignore it's use count?

Thanks for taking a look!

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 9:09 PM Philip Reames <listmail at
philipreames.com> wrote:
> On 9/27/19 1:40 PM, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev wrote:
> > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103 the InstCombine learned that
shift-by-sext
> > is simply a shift-by-zext.
>
> Just to make sure I'm following, the reasoning here is that the shift
> amount must be positive or the shift would produce poison? And thus,
> it's safe to assume that the sext == zext because we've (at worst)
> removed UB in the original program?
Yes.
zext and sext are equivalent for non-negative inputs.
For negative inputs, sext will produce negative output.
And interpreted as unsigned number, such negative shift amount
is *always* bigger than largest legal shift amount:
* i1 can only be shifted by 0
* i2 can only be shifted by 1 (positive); 2,3 (negative) are not legal
shift amounts
* i3 can only be shifted by 1,2 (positive); 3 (positive) and 4-7
(negative) are not legal shift amounts
* i4 can only be shifted by 1,2,3 (positive); 4-7 (positive) and 8-15
(negative) are not legal shift amounts
* and so on.
Therefore we must not have negative shift amount (or we have UB), so
we can just use zext.
> If so, two slightly off topic ideas.
>
> 1) This feels like a demanded bits problem.  We know that any shift
> value outside of a given range is UB, and thus only need to demand the
> bits necessary to represent the defined range.  Might be an interesting
> extension.
Most specifically, we demand only low
bitwidth(shift)-ctlz(bitwidth(shift)-1) bits
of shift amount, yes. I did think of it as a demanded bits problem,
but didn't really succeed, let me see again..
> 2) Are we possibly missing opportunities by not exploiting knowledge of
> the a known negative shift amount?
Anything specific you are thinking of?
> > But the transform is limited to single-use sext.
> > We can quite trivially get a case where there are two shifts by the
same sext:
> > https://godbolt.org/z/j6mO3t  <- We should handle those cases.
> >
> > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103#1686130 Sanjay Patel notes that
this
> > sext is intrusive for analysis, that we will gain far better analysis
with zext,
> > so we should just ignore forego of the one-use check,
> > and simply replace all shift-by-sext with shift-by-zext.
>
> Doing the multi-use case is unfortunately complicated.  Your limited use
> scan might be a reasonable option in practice, but the need for cutoffs
> creates undesirable dynamics.
To reiterate, the proposal is to just always transform that sext into zext,
with no care to the use count. So i'm not sure what cutoffs you mean.
> A couple ideas on how to possibly approach the problem:
>
> 1) If we can prove that one shift dominates the other uses, then if we
> can find UB which triggers based on overflow, we can do the replacement.
I'm not sure what all this means.
Here i only want to get rid of *all* of those sext's for good, so everything
else that may have to deal with looking past extension of shift amount
doesn't need to be modified.
> 2) Having a general multiple use demanded use routine would be very
> powerful.  Is it worth exploring the harder topic for generality?
There is some support for multi-use demandedbits in backend.
As for middle-end i'm not sure.
For sure, having that powerful mechanism may be useful, in general.
> 3) If we had an anyextend IR node, it might be reasonable to eagerly
> produce the duplicate nodes, and rely on later CSE.  I keep running
> across cases where we have an extend where we know the high bits don't
> matter, maybe it's time to represent that?
>
> > I implemented this proposed suggestion here:
> > https://reviews.llvm.org/D68150
> >
> > Does anyone see any problems with that trade-off?
> >
Roman.
> > _______________________________________________
> > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 8:57 PM Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Thanks for taking a look!
>
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 9:09 PM Philip Reames <listmail at
philipreames.com>
> wrote:
> > On 9/27/19 1:40 PM, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev wrote:
> > > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103 the InstCombine learned that
> shift-by-sext
> > > is simply a shift-by-zext.
> >
> > Just to make sure I'm following, the reasoning here is that the
shift
> > amount must be positive or the shift would produce poison? And thus,
> > it's safe to assume that the sext == zext because we've (at
worst)
> > removed UB in the original program?
> Yes.
> zext and sext are equivalent for non-negative inputs.
> For negative inputs, sext will produce negative output.
> And interpreted as unsigned number, such negative shift amount
> is *always* bigger than largest legal shift amount:
> * i1 can only be shifted by 0
> * i2 can only be shifted by 1 (positive); 2,3 (negative) are not legal
> shift amounts
> * i3 can only be shifted by 1,2 (positive); 3 (positive) and 4-7
> (negative) are not legal shift amounts
> * i4 can only be shifted by 1,2,3 (positive); 4-7 (positive) and 8-15
> (negative) are not legal shift amounts
> * and so on.
> Therefore we must not have negative shift amount (or we have UB), so
> we can just use zext.
>
> > If so, two slightly off topic ideas.
> >
> > 1) This feels like a demanded bits problem.  We know that any shift
> > value outside of a given range is UB, and thus only need to demand the
> > bits necessary to represent the defined range.  Might be an
interesting
> > extension.
> Most specifically, we demand only low
> bitwidth(shift)-ctlz(bitwidth(shift)-1) bits
> of shift amount, yes. I did think of it as a demanded bits problem,
> but didn't really succeed, let me see again..
>
While the demanded bits analysis in InstCombine doesn't handle multi-use
scenarios (apart from cases where a specific use may be reduced to an
instruction operand), it should be possible to handle this as part of BDCE.
This would require a) computing demanded bits for the shift amount in the
DemandedBits analysis, which currently doesn't happen, and b) replacing a
sext with a zext in BDCE if the top bit of the source operand is not
demanded.

Nikita

> > 2) Are we possibly missing opportunities by not exploiting knowledge
of
> > the a known negative shift amount?
> Anything specific you are thinking of?
>
> > > But the transform is limited to single-use sext.
> > > We can quite trivially get a case where there are two shifts by
the
> same sext:
> > > https://godbolt.org/z/j6mO3t  <- We should handle those cases.
> > >
> > > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103#1686130 Sanjay Patel notes
that
> this
> > > sext is intrusive for analysis, that we will gain far better
analysis
> with zext,
> > > so we should just ignore forego of the one-use check,
> > > and simply replace all shift-by-sext with shift-by-zext.
> >
> > Doing the multi-use case is unfortunately complicated.  Your limited
use
> > scan might be a reasonable option in practice, but the need for
cutoffs
> > creates undesirable dynamics.
> To reiterate, the proposal is to just always transform that sext into zext,
> with no care to the use count. So i'm not sure what cutoffs you mean.
>
> > A couple ideas on how to possibly approach the problem:
> >
> > 1) If we can prove that one shift dominates the other uses, then if we
> > can find UB which triggers based on overflow, we can do the
replacement.
> I'm not sure what all this means.
> Here i only want to get rid of *all* of those sext's for good, so
> everything
> else that may have to deal with looking past extension of shift amount
> doesn't need to be modified.
>
> > 2) Having a general multiple use demanded use routine would be very
> > powerful.  Is it worth exploring the harder topic for generality?
> There is some support for multi-use demandedbits in backend.
> As for middle-end i'm not sure.
> For sure, having that powerful mechanism may be useful, in general.
>
> > 3) If we had an anyextend IR node, it might be reasonable to eagerly
> > produce the duplicate nodes, and rely on later CSE.  I keep running
> > across cases where we have an extend where we know the high bits
don't
> > matter, maybe it's time to represent that?
> >
> > > I implemented this proposed suggestion here:
> > > https://reviews.llvm.org/D68150
> > >
> > > Does anyone see any problems with that trade-off?
> > >
> Roman.
>
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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The thing is, we *don't* "not demand" those high bits.
We *don't* not care what's in those bits - IR shifts don't mask
their
shift amounts.
I.e we can't replace `x >> (32-y)` with `x >> (-y)`,
which would be legal transform should we not demand those bits.
We very much demand them. We just know those bits to be zero.

And i'm not sure how to convey that to SimplifyDemandedBits().
I can't pass the Known down the stack, the function resets it first thing,
so Known can only be passed from callee to the caller.

This is why i'm asking whether anyone is concerned if we proceed with
https://reviews.llvm.org/D68150

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 10:44 PM Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 8:57 PM Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for taking a look!
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 9:09 PM Philip Reames <listmail at
philipreames.com> wrote:
>> > On 9/27/19 1:40 PM, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev wrote:
>> > > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103 the InstCombine learned
that shift-by-sext
>> > > is simply a shift-by-zext.
>> >
>> > Just to make sure I'm following, the reasoning here is that
the shift
>> > amount must be positive or the shift would produce poison? And
thus,
>> > it's safe to assume that the sext == zext because we've
(at worst)
>> > removed UB in the original program?
>> Yes.
>> zext and sext are equivalent for non-negative inputs.
>> For negative inputs, sext will produce negative output.
>> And interpreted as unsigned number, such negative shift amount
>> is *always* bigger than largest legal shift amount:
>> * i1 can only be shifted by 0
>> * i2 can only be shifted by 1 (positive); 2,3 (negative) are not legal
>> shift amounts
>> * i3 can only be shifted by 1,2 (positive); 3 (positive) and 4-7
>> (negative) are not legal shift amounts
>> * i4 can only be shifted by 1,2,3 (positive); 4-7 (positive) and 8-15
>> (negative) are not legal shift amounts
>> * and so on.
>> Therefore we must not have negative shift amount (or we have UB), so
>> we can just use zext.
>>
>> > If so, two slightly off topic ideas.
>> >
>> > 1) This feels like a demanded bits problem.  We know that any
shift
>> > value outside of a given range is UB, and thus only need to demand
the
>> > bits necessary to represent the defined range.  Might be an
interesting
>> > extension.
>> Most specifically, we demand only low
>> bitwidth(shift)-ctlz(bitwidth(shift)-1) bits
>> of shift amount, yes. I did think of it as a demanded bits problem,
>> but didn't really succeed, let me see again..
>
>
> While the demanded bits analysis in InstCombine doesn't handle
multi-use scenarios (apart from cases where a specific use may be reduced to an
instruction operand), it should be possible to handle this as part of BDCE. This
would require a) computing demanded bits for the shift amount in the
DemandedBits analysis, which currently doesn't happen, and b) replacing a
sext with a zext in BDCE if the top bit of the source operand is not demanded.
>
> Nikita
>
>>
>> > 2) Are we possibly missing opportunities by not exploiting
knowledge of
>> > the a known negative shift amount?
>> Anything specific you are thinking of?
>>
>> > > But the transform is limited to single-use sext.
>> > > We can quite trivially get a case where there are two shifts
by the same sext:
>> > > https://godbolt.org/z/j6mO3t  <- We should handle those
cases.
>> > >
>> > > In https://reviews.llvm.org/D68103#1686130 Sanjay Patel notes
that this
>> > > sext is intrusive for analysis, that we will gain far better
analysis with zext,
>> > > so we should just ignore forego of the one-use check,
>> > > and simply replace all shift-by-sext with shift-by-zext.
>> >
>> > Doing the multi-use case is unfortunately complicated.  Your
limited use
>> > scan might be a reasonable option in practice, but the need for
cutoffs
>> > creates undesirable dynamics.
>> To reiterate, the proposal is to just always transform that sext into
zext,
>> with no care to the use count. So i'm not sure what cutoffs you
mean.
>>
>> > A couple ideas on how to possibly approach the problem:
>> >
>> > 1) If we can prove that one shift dominates the other uses, then
if we
>> > can find UB which triggers based on overflow, we can do the
replacement.
>> I'm not sure what all this means.
>> Here i only want to get rid of *all* of those sext's for good, so
everything
>> else that may have to deal with looking past extension of shift amount
>> doesn't need to be modified.
>>
>> > 2) Having a general multiple use demanded use routine would be
very
>> > powerful.  Is it worth exploring the harder topic for generality?
>> There is some support for multi-use demandedbits in backend.
>> As for middle-end i'm not sure.
>> For sure, having that powerful mechanism may be useful, in general.
>>
>> > 3) If we had an anyextend IR node, it might be reasonable to
eagerly
>> > produce the duplicate nodes, and rely on later CSE.  I keep
running
>> > across cases where we have an extend where we know the high bits
don't
>> > matter, maybe it's time to represent that?
>> >
>> > > I implemented this proposed suggestion here:
>> > > https://reviews.llvm.org/D68150
>> > >
>> > > Does anyone see any problems with that trade-off?
>> > >
>> Roman.
>>
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > LLVM Developers mailing list
>> > > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> > > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>> _______________________________________________
>> LLVM Developers mailing list
>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev