School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh Institute for Computing Systems Architecture - School of Informatics
Institute for Computing
Systems Architecture

Our GCC compiler for the EnCore platform is based on the ARC GNU toolchain (GCC version 4.2.1) with its support for the ARC 600 and ARC 700 processors. Due to the full instruction set compatibility with these commercial processors a plain, non-modified ARC-GCC distribution can be used for code generation for EnCore.

Building on top of an established instruction set architecture and an existing open-source software toolchain has several advantages for a research project such as PASTA. First, a working set of software development tools is available right from the start of the project. Second, the effort for infrastructure development is minimised. Third, any new compiler optimisations developed by the GCC community are directly available and further improve our compiler at no cost.

Among the features of the plain ARC-GCC toolchain are:

  • Floating-point support. The compiler can be directed to emit genuine floating-point instructions or to use software emulation for floating-point operations.
  • Mixed mode code generation. ARCompact 16bit instructions are intermixed with 32bit instructions. This results in higher code density (=lower code size) and better instruction cache behaviour.
  • Zero-overhead loops. Hardware loops support efficient 'for' loop implementation and are generated wherever possible.

EnCore specific extensions

In the PASTA project we have extended the original ARC-GCC compiler with code generation passes that deal with the EnCore-specific custom instructions resulting from automated instruction set extension.

Current ISE methodologies are typically limited to single applications, i.e. there is no compiler support available for complex instructions patterns generated by previous ISE identification and synthesis stages. Instead, the ISE identification tool specifies where the instructions should be used.

To be able to attempt to re-use instructions in additional programs to the ones they were generated for we implemented a complex instruction selector within GCC. Unusually, this performs instruction selection at the GIMPLE level. The reason for this is that it identifies matches based on the same internal representation as the ISE identification tool and this representation is constructed from GIMPLE, it also avoids the well-known difficulties in extending the expand GENERIC-to-RTL pass with machine-specific higher level instructions. Only complex instructions are matched by this pass, so many GIMPLE nodes will not be covered, these are handled by standard instruction selection in the back-end. The standard back-end is not used with the complex instructions as its pattern matching capabilities are not able to handle the large graphs that describe the instructions being considered here.

A trivial hand-written example of an instruction matched to a basic block is shown in the diagram below. The graph shows a basic block that contains two non-dependent integer multiplies and an addition, the multiplies are implemented by an extension instruction. The copy nodes should be able to be eliminated during register allocation, so won't actually result in any move instructions being used.

An example instruction that has been matched to a small basic block.

The next figure shows a more realistic example where four instructions are matched to a larger basic block.

The shape of a basic block that has been mapped to four separate
  extension instructions, two of which are entirely parallel and another two have
  internal dependencies.

Links to the MilePost project

The PASTA project maintains close links to the EU-funded MilePost project where machine learning for embedded program optimisation is investigated. In particular, MilePost has extended the ARC port of the GCC compiler (the same that we are using in the PASTA project) with the ability to automatically tune its optimisation engine to new hardware configurations (e.g. cache sizes) and applications. As a result the MilePost GCC compiler regularly outperforms the manually tuned baseline GCC compiler and our own EnCore compiler can take immediate advantage of this on-going optimisation effort.

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