About

Enablement of auto-vectorization in LLVM for RISC-V, targeting the V extension version 1.0.   While the long term goal is to focus on vector length agnostic (VLA) approaches to vectorization, some of LLVM's vectorizer may still be biased towards fixed vector sizes.  Thus we expect to find cases that are not well handled using VLA approaches and we expect to support VLS approaches to vectorization a stop-gap alternatives.

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LLVM's support for auto-vectorization on RISC-V appears to be improving regularly, but it is sensitive to having reasonable micro-architectural data available.  Thus it may be necessary to stub-out values for these key parameters when enabling auto-vectorization on a new micro-architecture, or to disable the costing model.

Stakeholders/Partners

RISE:

Ventana: 1 FTE focused on getting necessary uarch data ready

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SiFive: Craig Topper

Rivos:

External:

Alex Bradbury

Dependencies

The most pressing upstream dependencies are:

1. PSABI specification for vector argument passing and return values
2. Kernel support to enable discovery of the V extension
3. glibc support for libmvec to enable vector API for key math library functions such as sin, cos, sqrt, etc (does LLVM support libmvec calls?)

Status

Updates

13 Jul 2023

• Evaluation of LLVM trunk indicates ongoing improvements for key routines in x264
• Notable lack of strided memory accesses will impact x264 performance 

28 Jun 2023 

• SLP (superword level parallelism or straight line parallelism) enabled for short vectors upstream
• Ventana has lit up autovect in its internal LLVM tree after adding uarch details to that tree
  • One of the simpler routines now generating reference/target code

01 Jun 2023 

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30 Aug 2023 

• Improving vectorization split off as distinct project