panic when compiling SHA

Simon Marlow marlowsd at gmail.com
Wed Jan 8 10:37:47 UTC 2014


On 08/01/14 07:35, Carter Schonwald wrote:
> well said iavor.
> It perhaps hints at the register allocators needing some love? I hope to
> dig deep into those myself later this year, but maybe it needs some
> wibbles to clean up for 7.8 right now?

There's a bit of confusion here.  Let me try to clarify:

  - the graph-colouring register allocator now trips the spill slot
    limit with SHA-1, where it didn't previously.  This may be
    because earlier compiler stages are generating worse code, or
    it may be because this allocator has bitrotted (see #7679).

  - The code compiles fine without the flag -fregs-graph.

  - The limitation on spill slots that existed in all versions prior to
    7.8 has been lifted in 7.8, but only for the linear register
    allocator (the default one that you get without -fregs-graph).

So, let's just disable -fregs-graph in 7.8.1.

Ben is right that avoiding -fregs-graph doesn't really fix the problem, 
because we'll probably get crappy code for SHA-1 now.  But someone needs 
to work on -fregs-graph.

This ticket is for the performance issue:
   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7679

And I just created this one for the spill slot issue:
   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8657

Cheers,
Simon


>
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 2:14 AM, Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatchki at gmail.com
> <mailto:iavor.diatchki at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I find it a bit perplexing (and not at all constructive) that we are
>     arguing over semantics here.  We have a program (1 module, ~1000
>     lines of "no fancy extension Haskell"), which causes GHC to panic.
>       This is a bug.  An invariant that we were assuming did not
>     actually hold.  Hence the message that the "impossible" happened.
>       If GHC decides to refuse to compile a program, it should not panic
>     but, rather, explain what happened and maybe suggest a workaround.
>
>     I am not familiar with GHC's back-end, but it seems that there might
>     be something interesting that's going on here.   The SHA library
>     works fine with 7.6.3, and it compiles (admittedly very slowly)
>     using GHC head on my 64-bit machine.   So something has changed, and
>     it'd be nice if we understood what's causing the problem.
>
>     Ben suggested that the issue might be the INLINE pragmas, but
>     clearly that's not the problem, as Adam reproduced the same behavior
>     without those pragmas.  If the issue is indeed with the built-in
>     inline heuristics, it sounds like we either should fix the
>     heuristics, or come up with some suggestions about what to avoid in
>     user programs.  Or, perhaps, the issue something completely
>     unrelated (e.g., a bug in the register allocator).   Either way, I
>     think this deserves a ticket.
>
>     -Iavor
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:11 PM, Carter Schonwald
>     <carter.schonwald at gmail.com <mailto:carter.schonwald at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Adam,
>         I agree that it should be considered a misfeature (or at the
>         very least a good stress test that currently breaks the register
>         allocator). That said,
>         INLINE / INLINEABLE are only needed for intermodule
>         optimization, have you tried using the special "inline" primop
>         selectively, or using INLINEABLE plus selective inline? I think
>         inline should work in the defining module even if you don't
>         provide an INLINE or INLINEABLE.
>
>         question 1: does the code compile well when you use -fllvm?
>         (seems like the discussion so far has been NCG focused).
>         how does the generated assembly fair that way vs the workaroudn
>         path on NCG?
>
>
>
>
>         On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:57 PM, Adam Wick <awick at galois.com
>         <mailto:awick at galois.com>> wrote:
>
>             On Jan 7, 2014, at 2:27 AM, Ben Lippmeier
>             <benl at ouroborus.net <mailto:benl at ouroborus.net>> wrote:
>              > On 07/01/2014, at 9:26 , Adam Wick <awick at galois.com
>             <mailto:awick at galois.com>> wrote:
>              >
>              >>> Not if we just have this one test. I'd be keen to blame
>             excessive use of inline pragmas in the SHA library itself,
>             or excessive optimisation flags. It's not really a bug in
>             GHC until there are two tests that exhibit the same problem.
>              >>
>              >> The SHA library uses SPECIALIZE, INLINE, and bang
>             patterns in fairly standard ways. There’s nothing too exotic
>             in there, I just basically sprinkled hints in places I
>             thought would be useful, and then backed those up with
>             benchmarking.
>              >
>              > Ahh. It's the "sprinkled hints in places I thought would
>             be useful" which is what I'm concerned about. If you just
>             add pragmas without understanding their effect on the core
>             program then it'll bite further down the line. Did you
>             compare the object code size as well as wall clock speedup?
>
>             I understand the pragmas and what they do with my code. I
>             use SPECIALIZE twice for two functions. In both functions,
>             it was clearer to write the function as (a -> a -> a -> a),
>             but I wanted specialized versions for the two versions that
>             were going to be used, in which (a == Word32) or (a ==
>             Word64). This benchmarked as faster while maintaining code
>             clarity and concision. I use INLINE in five places, each of
>             them a SHA step function, with the understanding that it
>             would generate ideal code for a compiler for the
>             performance-critical parts of the algorithm: straight line,
>             single-block code with no conditionals.
>
>             When I did my original performance work, several versions of
>             GHC ago, I did indeed consider compile time, runtime
>             performance, and space usage. I picked what I thought was a
>             reasonable balance at the time.
>
>             I also just performed an experiment in which I took the SHA
>             library, deleted all instances of INLINE and SPECIALIZE, and
>             compiled it with HEAD on 32-bit Linux. You get the same
>             crash. So my usage of SPECIALIZE and INLINE is beside the point.
>
>              > Sadly, "valid input" isn't a well defined concept in
>             practice. You could write a "valid" 10GB Haskell source file
>             that obeyed the Haskell standard grammar, but I wouldn't
>             expect that to compile either.
>
>             I would. I’m a little disappointed that ghc-devs does not. I
>             wouldn’t expect it to compile quickly, but I would expect it
>             to run.
>
>              > You could also write small (< 1k) source programs that
>             trigger complexity problems in Hindley-Milner style type
>             inference. You could also use compile-time meta programming
>             (like Template Haskell) to generate intermediate code that
>             is well formed but much too big to compile. The fact that a
>             program obeys a published grammar is not sufficient to
>             expect it to compile with a particular implementation (sorry
>             to say).
>
>             If I write a broken Template Haskell macro, then yes, I
>             agree. This is not the case in this example.
>
>              > Adding an INLINE pragma is akin to using compile-time
>             meta programming.
>
>             Is it? I find that a strange point of view. Isn’t INLINE
>             just a strong hint to the compiler that this function should
>             be inlined? How is using INLINE any different from simply
>             manually inserting the code at every call site?
>
>
>             - Adam
>             _______________________________________________
>             ghc-devs mailing list
>             ghc-devs at haskell.org <mailto:ghc-devs at haskell.org>
>             http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>
>
>
>         _______________________________________________
>         ghc-devs mailing list
>         ghc-devs at haskell.org <mailto:ghc-devs at haskell.org>
>         http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ghc-devs mailing list
> ghc-devs at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>



More information about the ghc-devs mailing list