TODO

The compiler is quite complete now in terms of functionality. It could pass almos all of the piglit OCL test cases and the pass rate for the OpenCV test suite is also quite good now. But there are plenty of things to do for the final performance tuning.

OpenCL standard library

Today we define the OpenCL API in header file src/ocl_stdlib.h.

By the way, one question remains: do we want to implement the high-precision functions as inline functions or as external functions to call? Indeed, inlining all functions may lead to severe code bloats while calling functions will require to implement a proper ABI. We certainly want to do both actually.

LLVM front-end

The code is defined in src/llvm. We used the SPIR and the OpenCL profile to compile the code. Therefore, a good part of the job is already done. However, many things must be implemented:

  • From LLVM 3.3, we use SPIR IR. We need to use the compiler defined type to represent sampler_t/image2d_t/image1d_t/....

  • Considering to use libclc in our project and avoid to use the PCH which is not compatible for different clang versions. And may contribute what we have done in the ocl_stdlib.h to libclc if possible.

  • Optimize math functions.

Gen IR

The code is defined in src/ir. Main things to do are:

  • Support structurized while loop and self loop BBs.

  • Finishing the handling of function arguments (see the IR description for more details)

  • Merging of independent uniform loads (and samples). This is a major performance improvement once the uniform analysis is done. Basically, several uniform loads may be collapsed into one load if no writes happens in-between. This will obviously impact both instruction selection and the register allocation.

  • Implement fast path for small local variables. When the kernel only defines a small local array/variable, there will be a good chance to allocate the local array/variable in register space rather than system memory. This will reduce a lot of memory load/stroe from the system memory. After custom loop unrolling, this optimization is not very important for most cases now.

Backend

The code is defined in src/backend. Main things to do are:

  • Optimize register spilling (see the compiler backend description for more details)

  • Implementing proper instruction selection. A "simple" tree matching algorithm should provide good results for Gen

  • Improving the instruction scheduling pass. Need to implement proper pre register allocation scheduling to lower register pressure.

  • Reduce the macro instructions in gen_context. The macro instructions added in gen_context will not get a chance to do post register allocation scheduling.

  • Peephole optimization. There are many chances to do further peephole optimization.

  • Implement a better framework to do backend instructions optimizations.

General plumbing

I tried to keep the code clean, well, as far as C++ can be really clean. There are some header cleaning steps required though, in particular in the backend code.

The context used in the IR code generation (see src/ir/context.*pp) should be split up and cleaned up too.

I also purely and simply copied and pasted the Gen ISA disassembler from Mesa. This leads to code duplication. Also some messages used by OpenCL (untyped reads and writes) are not properly decoded yet.

All of those code should be improved and cleaned up are tracked with "XXX" comments in the code.