[RFC PATCH v8 09/21] riscv: Add task switch support for vector

[Paul Walmsley]

Hello Darius,

On Tue, 5 Oct 2021, Darius Rad wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 08:36:30PM +0800, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > Darius Rad <darius at bluespec.com> 於 2021年9月29日 週三 下午9:28寫道：
> > >
> > > On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 10:56:52PM +0800, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > > > Darius Rad <darius at bluespec.com> 於 2021年9月13日 週一 下午8:21寫道：
> > > > >
> > > > > On 9/8/21 1:45 PM, Greentime Hu wrote:
> > > > > > This patch adds task switch support for vector. It supports partial lazy
> > > > > > save and restore mechanism. It also supports all lengths of vlen.

[ ... ]

> > > > > So this will unconditionally enable vector instructions, and allocate
> > > > > memory for vector state, for all processes, regardless of whether vector
> > > > > instructions are used?
> > > >
> > > > Yes, it will enable vector if has_vector() is true. The reason that we
> > > > choose to enable and allocate memory for user space program is because
> > > > we also implement some common functions in the glibc such as memcpy
> > > > vector version and it is called very often by every process. So that
> > > > we assume if the user program is running in a CPU with vector ISA
> > > > would like to use vector by default. If we disable it by default and
> > > > make it trigger the illegal instruction, that might be a burden since
> > > > almost every process will use vector glibc memcpy or something like
> > > > that.
> > >
> > > Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that almost every process
> > > would use vector operations?  One could easily argue that the converse is
> > > true: no existing software uses the vector extension now, so most likely a
> > > process will not be using it.
> > 
> > Glibc ustreaming is just starting so you didn't see software using the 
> > vector extension now and this patchset is testing based on those 
> > optimized glibc too. Vincent Chen is working on the glibc vector 
> > support upstreaming and we will also upstream the vector version glibc 
> > memcpy, memcmp, memchr, memmove, memset, strcmp, strlen. Then we will 
> > see platform with vector support can use vector version mem* and str* 
> > functions automatically based on ifunc and platform without vector 
> > will use the original one automatically. These could be done to select 
> > the correct optimized glibc functions by ifunc mechanism.

In your reply, I noticed that you didn't address Greentime's response 
here.  But this looks like the key issue.  If common library functions are 
vector-accelerated, wouldn't it make sense that almost every process would 
wind up using vector instructions?  And thus there wouldn't be much point 
to skipping the vector context memory allocation?


- Paul