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1

Hi All!

I will be applying to the LLVM project for this GSoC, and I wanted some preliminary sanity check on my project idea.

I intend to implement split (segmented) stacks for LLVM (like we have in Go, and as being implemented for GCC [1]). A lot of what follows is lifted from [1]; I will progressively add more details as I get more familiar with the LLVM codebase.

I intend to start with the simplest possible approach - representing the stack as a doubly linked list of _block_s, the size of each _block_ being a power of two. This can later be modified to improve performance and accommodate other factors. Blocks will be chained together into a doubly linked list structure (using the first two words in the block as the next and previous pointers).

In the prologue, a function will check whether the current block has enough stack space. This is easily done for function which don't have variable sized allocas, and for ones which do, we can assume some worst-case upper bound. The prologue can then call an intrinsic (let's call it llvm.adjust_stack) which allocates a new block (possibly by delegating this to a user-provided callback), copies the arguments, saves the previous stack pointer (in the new block), and adjusts the next and previous pointers. It will also have to adjust the stack pointer, and the frame pointer, if it is being maintained. Cleanup can be done by hijacking the return value, as also mentioned in [1]. It might make sense to leave the allocated blocks around, to prevent re-allocating the next time the program needs more stack space.

DWARF info can be generated as follows: since we know the offset of base of the stack frame from the stack pointer (or we are maintaining a frame pointer), we can always say whether the concerned call frame is the first call frame or not. In the second case, all the previous register values can be computed as usual, and in the first case, we will add an extra indirection, involving looking up the stack pointer saved in this block's header.

One thing I'd really like some input on is whether implementing split stacks would be useful enough to warrant the effort (especially keeping in mind that this is pretty useless on 64 bit architectures).

[1] SplitStacks - GCC Wiki

2

I intend to start with the simplest possible approach - representing the
stack as a doubly linked list of _block_s, the size of each _block_
being a power of two. This can later be modified to improve performance
and accommodate other factors. Blocks will be chained together into a
doubly linked list structure (using the first two words in the block as
the next and previous pointers).

Where do you plan to store the pointers? What changes to the runtime
environment does this require?

In the prologue, a function will check whether the current block has
enough stack space. This is easily done for function which don't have
variable sized allocas, and for ones which do, we can assume some
worst-case upper bound.

If there are allocas involved, it is quite likely they are inside loops
etc., in which case there are no simple stack boundaries. This shouldn't
be a problem if the space for all static variables was allocated at the
beginning.

The prologue can then call an intrinsic (let's
call it llvm.adjust_stack) which allocates a new block (possibly by
delegating this to a user-provided callback), copies the arguments,
saves the previous stack pointer (in the new block), and adjusts the
next and previous pointers.

Why do you need to copy the arguments? In fact, why do you think you can
actually copy the arguments? Consider printf for this.

It will also have to adjust the stack pointer, and the frame pointer,
if it is being maintained. Cleanup can be done by hijacking the return
value, as also mentioned in [1]. It might make sense to leave the
allocated blocks around, to prevent re-allocating the next time the
program needs more stack space.

Hijacking the return value is a nice trick. I'm not sure about freeing /
not-freeing the unused block, this again has implications for the
runtime environment.

Have you considered how much work call graph optimisations require?
Especially with LTO it should be possible to kill many of the checks by
computing used stack space across segments of the call graph. One of the
papers on service scalability discussed this for light weight threads.
Forgot which one, it's been a while.

One thing I'd really like some input on is whether implementing split
stacks would be useful enough to warrant the effort (especially keeping
in mind that this is pretty useless on 64 bit architectures).

I don't think it is useless on 64bit architectures. You can't always
make arbitrary large reservations of address space (e.g. optimised output of
Chicken). They also don't come without a price. Also consider something
like a kernel environment, where you really want to have a minimal
default stack, but be able to fallback gracefully.

Joerg

3

Hi!

Thanks for the review. What follows is a revised version of the
proposal. I'll post this on Melange after getting some more feedback.

Segmented stacks for LLVM, GSoC '11

4

Just a quick clarification: is anyone interested in mentoring me for
this project?

5

Hi Sanjoy,

Just a quick clarification: is anyone interested in mentoring me for
this project?

it seems like a great project (but I am not competent to mentor it). I guess
it is needed if dragonegg is ever going to support the Go language. It would
also be pleasant for Ada if task stacks grew automagically when needed (having
to set an adequate but not too ridiculous stack size when creating tasks is a
pain).

Ciao,

Duncan.

6

I wonder - would something like this allow for multiple stacks for a single thread? I’m thinking of something like continuations / fibers / green threads, which would be very handy.

7

I wonder - would something like this allow for multiple stacks for a single thread? I’m thinking of something like continuations / fibers / green threads, which would be very handy.

I haven’t looked at the proposal, but yes, this would be very useful functionality for LLVM to provide.

-Chris

8

I wonder - would something like this allow for multiple stacks for a single thread? I’m thinking of something like continuations / fibers / green threads, which would be very handy.

I haven’t looked at the proposal, but yes, this would be very useful functionality for LLVM to provide.

Another thing I’d like is for any proposed segmented stack mechanism to be garbage-collector friendly - which essentially means an API that can reliably iterate through all of the stack frames, starting from the current function, and calculate the correct return address for each stack frame. I’m envisioning something like this:

frame = llvm.currentframe();
while frame != NULL {
retaddr = llvm.returnaddr(frame);
// do stack tracing using frame and retaddr to identify stack roots.
frame = llvm.nextframe(frame);
}

This is essentially what I do now with the EBP register - but it would be better if it were encapsulated behind an API, so that frontends wouldn’t have to know about specific registers.

9

(Sorry for replying to the wrong post, but the original one had gone out of scope when this occurred to me.)

In the prologue, a function will check whether the current block has
enough stack space. This is easily done for function which don't have
variable sized allocas, and for ones which do, we can assume some
worst-case upper bound.

What would you do if a function allocas in a loop? The programmer would know that the loop won't execute, say, more than twice, but your code doesn't unless you're lucky.
Or if the size to be allocated is passed in as a parameter, from code that the compiler does not even see in this run (think dynamically linked code, or alloca sizes that depend on user input).

So you'll need a fallback strategy for such situation.

Either fall back to the standard stack (but that would more-or-less defeat the purpose of this all).

Or make the code generators deal with stacks that have segmented per-function stack frames (whether that's even feasible, I have no idea, but I guess it wouldn't be without a gruesome amount of work, and this project would stay restricted to those backends that happen to get maintained for this).

Or deal with such cases by redirecting all allocas to the heap. With the possible option of moving them back to the stack where the compiler can indeed infer the stack requirement beforehand.

- - -

In general, I think it's a good idea to avoid too large stack frames anyway. Operating systems and similar infrastructure tend to assume that the per-function stack requirement is limited to a small constant, and breaking that assumption can drive them into less well-tested code, triggering security holes or inefficiencies.

Just my 2c, and back to lurker mode.

Regards,
Jo

10

It doesn't have to. It is perfectly fine to allocate another stack
segment after the handling of fixed slots is done. All other entries on
the stack are addressed by pointer anyway. They don't care about being
in one stack segment relative to the frame pointer.

Joerg

11

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback. For context, my implementation plan is here:

First, about unwinding:

In architectures like x86-64, where unwinding based on DWARF info, there
shouldn't be any problems; since the DWARF info will be emitted
correctly. Otherwise, if the unwinding is done by following BP, it
should still be possible to have BP de-reference correctly (ref. "Frame
Pointers" section in the implementation plan). SP will not always have a
correct value - I don't know if this is problem.

About co-routines:

Here is a sketch of how I think co-routines can be implemented (I'll
merge this with the main implementation plan after I get some feedback):

Have a new instruction, called "yield" to return a value from a
co-routine, preserving the state. Thus, we immediately know which
functions are co-routines. Each co-routine will have a new stack.
Associate each co-routine with a thread-local global variable (called
saved_stack here, will have to be mangled with the name of the
co-routine) which points to the start stack block for that co-routine.
This will be the first block in the chain of blocks to follow.

The structure of the block will be similar to the structure of a regular
stack block, except that it will also have space to store two registers
- this_ip and this_sp.

The prologue of a co-routine will jump to a function similar to
setup_new_block (setup_new_block_coroutine) which will work like
setup_new_block, except:

1. It will first check if saved_stack is NULL. If it is NULL, it will
allocate a new block and save it to saved_stack. It if isn't, it'll
simply restore saved_sp, saved_ip.

2. In case a new block was allocated, it will pretty much do what
setup_block does, after which it will adjust the SP to make space for
the saved registers.

The destroy_block procedure will also have to be a little different
(mentioned below).

There are four things (relevant to this discussion) a co-routine can do:

Yield

This returns control to the calling function, without forgetting the
current state of the function. To do this, we save saved_ip and
saved_sp. Every yield be padded with instructions pushing and popping
the registers live at that point. Then we set the return value (register
or memory), and restore saved_sp and saved_ip from the current block. We
can't simply return because the actual return value has been hijacked to
provide for block cleanup.

Call to regular function

Just a simple call - the caller's prologue will handle setting up a it's
own stack space etc.

Call to Co-routine

This too should "just work", since all the heavy-lifting is done in the
co-routine's prologue. However, the above approach will not work for
nested co-routines (i.e. calling the same co-routine body with one call
is still active, recursively). I'm not sure if having support for nested
co-routines will add any value.

Return

This will be a regular return. Since the return value has been hijacked
to point to a another block of code (destroy_block_coroutine), control
will jump there instead.

destroy_block_coroutine will free the linked-list of stack blocks (we
have to free this, since we will won't have a reference to this list
anymore), set saved_stack for this co-routine to NULL, and restore
saved_sp and saved_ip.

12

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback. For context, my implementation plan is here:
http://pastebin.com/e9JMZNCE

First, about unwinding:

In architectures like x86-64, where unwinding based on DWARF info, there
shouldn’t be any problems; since the DWARF info will be emitted
correctly. Otherwise, if the unwinding is done by following BP, it
should still be possible to have BP de-reference correctly (ref. “Frame
Pointers” section in the implementation plan). SP will not always have a
correct value - I don’t know if this is problem.

About co-routines:

Here is a sketch of how I think co-routines can be implemented (I’ll
merge this with the main implementation plan after I get some feedback):

Have a new instruction, called “yield” to return a value from a
co-routine, preserving the state. Thus, we immediately know which
functions are co-routines. Each co-routine will have a new stack.
Associate each co-routine with a thread-local global variable (called
saved_stack here, will have to be mangled with the name of the
co-routine) which points to the start stack block for that co-routine.
This will be the first block in the chain of blocks to follow.

The structure of the block will be similar to the structure of a regular
stack block, except that it will also have space to store two registers

  • this_ip and this_sp.

The prologue of a co-routine will jump to a function similar to
setup_new_block (setup_new_block_coroutine) which will work like
setup_new_block, except:

  1. It will first check if saved_stack is NULL. If it is NULL, it will
    allocate a new block and save it to saved_stack. It if isn’t, it’ll
    simply restore saved_sp, saved_ip.

  2. In case a new block was allocated, it will pretty much do what
    setup_block does, after which it will adjust the SP to make space for
    the saved registers.

The destroy_block procedure will also have to be a little different
(mentioned below).

There are four things (relevant to this discussion) a co-routine can do:

Yield

This returns control to the calling function, without forgetting the
current state of the function. To do this, we save saved_ip and
saved_sp. Every yield be padded with instructions pushing and popping
the registers live at that point. Then we set the return value (register
or memory), and restore saved_sp and saved_ip from the current block. We
can’t simply return because the actual return value has been hijacked to
provide for block cleanup.

Call to regular function

Just a simple call - the caller’s prologue will handle setting up a it’s
own stack space etc.

Call to Co-routine

This too should “just work”, since all the heavy-lifting is done in the
co-routine’s prologue. However, the above approach will not work for
nested co-routines (i.e. calling the same co-routine body with one call
is still active, recursively). I’m not sure if having support for nested
co-routines will add any value.

Return

This will be a regular return. Since the return value has been hijacked
to point to a another block of code (destroy_block_coroutine), control
will jump there instead.

destroy_block_coroutine will free the linked-list of stack blocks (we
have to free this, since we will won’t have a reference to this list
anymore), set saved_stack for this co-routine to NULL, and restore
saved_sp and saved_ip.

I’m wondering how much of this should be implemented as new LLVM functionality, and how much should be left to the front-end compiler. With some additional LLVM intrinsics (e.g. llvm.stack.new.block, llvm.stack.delete.block, etc.), a front-end could take care of the details of how co-routines are actually implemented. This would also give the front-end freedom to implement whatever semantics/conventions are necessary/required for the source language. I’m just not sure having LLVM dictate how co-routines are implemented is the best way to approach this.

13

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback. For context, my implementation plan is here:
http://pastebin.com/e9JMZNCE

First, about unwinding:

In architectures like x86-64, where unwinding based on DWARF info, there
shouldn’t be any problems; since the DWARF info will be emitted
correctly. Otherwise, if the unwinding is done by following BP, it
should still be possible to have BP de-reference correctly (ref. “Frame
Pointers” section in the implementation plan). SP will not always have a
correct value - I don’t know if this is problem.

About co-routines:

Here is a sketch of how I think co-routines can be implemented (I’ll
merge this with the main implementation plan after I get some feedback):

Have a new instruction, called “yield” to return a value from a
co-routine, preserving the state. Thus, we immediately know which
functions are co-routines. Each co-routine will have a new stack.
Associate each co-routine with a thread-local global variable (called
saved_stack here, will have to be mangled with the name of the
co-routine) which points to the start stack block for that co-routine.
This will be the first block in the chain of blocks to follow.

The structure of the block will be similar to the structure of a regular
stack block, except that it will also have space to store two registers

  • this_ip and this_sp.

The prologue of a co-routine will jump to a function similar to
setup_new_block (setup_new_block_coroutine) which will work like
setup_new_block, except:

  1. It will first check if saved_stack is NULL. If it is NULL, it will
    allocate a new block and save it to saved_stack. It if isn’t, it’ll
    simply restore saved_sp, saved_ip.

  2. In case a new block was allocated, it will pretty much do what
    setup_block does, after which it will adjust the SP to make space for
    the saved registers.

The destroy_block procedure will also have to be a little different
(mentioned below).

There are four things (relevant to this discussion) a co-routine can do:

Yield

This returns control to the calling function, without forgetting the
current state of the function. To do this, we save saved_ip and
saved_sp. Every yield be padded with instructions pushing and popping
the registers live at that point. Then we set the return value (register
or memory), and restore saved_sp and saved_ip from the current block. We
can’t simply return because the actual return value has been hijacked to
provide for block cleanup.

Call to regular function

Just a simple call - the caller’s prologue will handle setting up a it’s
own stack space etc.

Call to Co-routine

This too should “just work”, since all the heavy-lifting is done in the
co-routine’s prologue. However, the above approach will not work for
nested co-routines (i.e. calling the same co-routine body with one call
is still active, recursively). I’m not sure if having support for nested
co-routines will add any value.

Return

This will be a regular return. Since the return value has been hijacked
to point to a another block of code (destroy_block_coroutine), control
will jump there instead.

destroy_block_coroutine will free the linked-list of stack blocks (we
have to free this, since we will won’t have a reference to this list
anymore), set saved_stack for this co-routine to NULL, and restore
saved_sp and saved_ip.

I’m wondering how much of this should be implemented as new LLVM functionality, and how much should be left to the front-end compiler. With some additional LLVM intrinsics (e.g. llvm.stack.new.block, llvm.stack.delete.block, etc.), a front-end could take care of the details of how co-routines are actually implemented. This would also give the front-end freedom to implement whatever semantics/conventions are necessary/required for the source language. I’m just not sure having LLVM dictate how co-routines are implemented is the best way to approach this.

I’m in agreement with Justin.

  1. It’s much easier to add new intrinsics to LLVM than it is to add new instructions. Library functions are even easier - in general you want to use intrinsics in cases where the presence of the intrinsic will affect the way the code is generated in the calling function.

  2. The API that I was envisioning for creating stacks was something fairly simple (maybe too simple):

// Create a new stack, where ‘stack_handle’ is some opaque object, and ‘func’
// is an LLVM function.
stack_handle = llvm.createstack(func, data)

// Switch to a different stack (i.e. yield)
llvm.switchstack(stack_handle)

// deallocate a stack
llvm.destroystack(stack_handle)

The frontend would be responsible for managing the lifetime of the stack_handle object. For something like Python generators, the stack_handle would be stored in the iterator object that is returned from the generator, and deallocated when the generator gets garbage-collected. For cooperative threads, the handle would be stored as a private member of a Thread or Coroutine class. Different languages would support different ways of using coroutines.

Similarly, the frontend would be responsible for passing data between the different coroutines, using either thread-local variables or some other method.

Also I’m thinking the frontend would be responsible for propagating exceptions between stacks - so for example, if my coroutine throws an exception that is not caught, but instead propagates all the way to the top of it’s stack, then that coroutine gets terminated, and depending on the language semantics, the same exception or another one gets thrown upon return from ‘yield’ in the other context. I would have no objection to implementing all of that logic in my frontend.

Because the internals of the stack_handle may be different on different platforms, I’m thinking that the frontend should only get a void* pointer - it doesn’t need to know what’s inside it. I think the frontend only needs a small number of operations: create, yield, destroy, and iterate through call frames (for garbage collection).

The ‘yield’ instruction seems somewhat inspired from Python’s ‘yield’ statement, which unfortunately has some substantial drawbacks - such as the fact that the yield must be in the top-most call frame in order for the compiler to know that the function is a generator / coroutine. In other words, you can’t in Python have a generator which calls a subroutine that does the yield. I’d like to avoid that limitation. Scheme and Lua, to name just two examples, have much more powerful models for doing continuations and coroutines, and I’d like to be able to support those. I think that can be done if we supply only the most minimal support on the LLVM side, and leave most of the details to the frontend.

14

This reminds me of Kenneth's "context" proposal from some time back:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2010-April/030787.html

I haven't compared the two too closely, but I thought I should throw
it out there as food for thought.

Reid

15

This reminds me of Kenneth’s “context” proposal from some time back:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2010-April/030787.html

I haven’t compared the two too closely, but I thought I should throw
it out there as food for thought.

That’s very interesting, I had not seen that before. It would pretty much solve all of my needs, although it only supports fixed-sized stacks. If this were combined with what Sanjoy is proposing that would be terrific.

There’s one point there that I don’t quite understand - the doc says that the context buffer that you allocate would be large enough to store a snapshot of all the machine’s registers. I would think that the machine registers would be more conveniently stored on the stack itself, and the context buffer would merely contain a pointer to the end of the stack - that means that a call to setcontext() would simply push all the current registers, change the stack pointer, and then pop each register value off of the stack before returning. However, that’s a minor implementation detail and not something I really care about one way or the other.

There’s one other feature that I can think of, not strictly necessary, but might help make context switching more efficient. Let’s assume that I have a yield() function in my language which wraps around llvm.setcontext() and performs some additional language-specific housekeeping. So for example:

void yield() {
llvm.swap_context(next_context, etc);
// If the other context returned with an exception,
// propagate the exception to the current context.
if (pending_throwable) {
throw pending_throwable;
}
}

So the problem here is that I have to perform a check for a throwable, when 99.9% of the time it will be NULL. One could get around this by playing games with the return address:

void yield() {
llvm.swap_context(next_context, etc);
normal_exit:
return;
error_exit:
throw pending_throwable;
}

The idea is that when you want to pass an exception to the other thread, you would modify the return address on the stack to point to error_exit instead of normal_exit. Unfortunately to get this to work you’d also have to convince LLVM’s optimizer not to complain about unreachable code, so maybe this is more trouble than it’s worth.