MAO - an Extensible Micro-Architectural Optimizer Robert Hundt, Easwaran Raman, Martin Thuresson, Neil Vachharajani Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA, 94043 frhundt, eraman,
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[email protected] .L3 movsbl 1(%rdi,%r8,4),%edx Abstract—Performance matters, and so does repeatability and movsbl (%rdi,%r8,4),%eax predictability. Today’s processors’ micro-architectures have be- # ... 6 instructions come so complex as to now contain many undocumented, not movl %edx, (%rsi,%r8,4) understood, and even puzzling performance cliffs. Small changes addq $1, %r8 in the instruction stream, such as the insertion of a single NOP instruction, can lead to significant performance deltas, with the nop # this instruction speeds up effect of exposing compiler and performance optimization efforts # the loop by 5% to perceived unwanted randomness. .L5: movsbl 1(%rdi,%r8,4),%edx This paper presents MAO, an extensible micro-architectural movsbl (%rdi,%r8,4),%eax assembly to assembly optimizer, which seeks to address this # ... identical code sequence problem for x86/64 processors. In essence, MAO is a thin wrapper movl %edx, (%rsi,%r8,4) around a common open source assembler infrastructure. It offers addq $1, %r8 basic operations, such as creation or modification of instructions, cmpl %r8d, %r9d simple data-flow analysis, and advanced infra-structure, such jg .L3 as loop recognition, and a repeated relaxation algorithm to compute instruction addresses and lengths. This infrastructure Fig. 1. Code snippet with high impact NOP instruction enables a plethora of passes for pattern matching, alignment specific optimizations, peep-holes, experiments (such as random insertion of NOPs), and fast prototyping of more sophisticated optimizations.