This post is part of a series; see part 1 and part 2.
In the last post I attempted to measure to understand the branch prediction behaviour of the interpreter. Whilst I expected lots of branch misprediction because of the single jmp instruction inherent in the giant-switch-statement design of the interpreter and indeed callgrind was hinting at very poor branch predicition this didn’t actually seem to be the case. Rather, callgrind was simulating a primitive branch predictor not as powerful as the branch predictor in my machines.
However, the interpreter was still quite slow. My rough and not very comprehensive testsuite-of-one: fib(39) was taking 26 seconds compared to lua taking 6 seconds. This difference gives hope that optimisation is possible.
Serendipously, around the time I wrote that last post, Andrew proposed adding language support for a labelled continue syntax that would produce more optimal machine code (including jmps for each instruction). Now that language support is still pending (but accepted) and so I couldn’t try that out (though I think you can sometimes convince the compiler to generate machine code of that shape). More seredipously, habermanjoined the conversation and suggested the use of using tail calls for interpreter dispatch. Ensured tail calls are already supported in zig with the @call builtin.
What might this look like (this is not exactly the code as it currently is but I want to show the shape of it more than the details at this point…we’ll come back to details later)?
fn @"i32.add"(self: *Interpreter) void {
const c2 = self.popOperand(u32);
const c1 = self.popOperand(u32);
self.pushOperandNoCheck(u32, c1 +% c2);
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self });
}
fn nop(self: *Interpreter) void {
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self });
}
inline fn dispatch(self: *Interpreter) void {
const next_instr = self.code[self.ip++];
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, lookup[@enumToInt(next_instr)], .{ self });
}
const lookup = [256]InstructionFunction{nop, @"i32.add"...
So what do we have here? We’re implementing two (virtual, i.e. WebAssembly) instructions: nop and @"i32.add". With the tail call interpreter we get a native function for every virtual instruction; this is different to the giant switch statement approach where all the virtual instruction implementatiosn live inside one big function.
The final statement in each virtual instruction implementation is a call to return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self });. The .modifier = .always_tail is what gives us a tail call. Rather than inline complete code that does the dispatch, I have a separate dispatch function which is declared as inline, which just allows us to write that code once but will be included…inline in the generated code for each virtual function.
What’s this lookup thing? We need to give @call the address of the function we want to call and we’ll do this here by just having a giant table of virtual instruction function pointers that can be indexed by the Opcode enum.
Hold on. Why do we need tail calls? What happens if we just call the function directly? If we don’t insist on a tail call a WebAssembly function which only uses a single virtual frame, let’s say a for loop counting up a number, that single virtual frame would allocate a number of native frames linear in the number of virtual instructions. We obviously don’t want this…we don’t want a WebAssembly loop to blow up the native stack on a large number. The tail call ensure that as we transition between virtual instructions we reuse the same native stack frame over and over again.
Another thing to note about tail calls is that we need to supply the same arguments of caller to callee.
Now, there’s a problem: in various places a virtual instruction implementation can error. So let’s have our tail calls !. E.g.
fn nop(self: *Interpreter) !void {
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self });
}
Unfortunately this does not compile due to https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5692. Okay, for the time being, we’re going to have to sacrifice some aesthetics. Instead of returning !void, we’ll continue to return void, but we’ll pass in an additional parameter being an optional pointer to an error:
fn nop(self: *Interpreter, err: ?*WasmError) void {
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self, err });
}
This err value will be set to null when entering the intepreter. If we want to signal an error we will set err to a WasmErrorand return fully from the tail call. For example the @"unreachable" function would be:
fn @"unreachable"(self: *Interpreter, err: *?WasmError) void {
err.* = error.TrapUnreachable;
}
In the initial code I wrote implementing the bare mininum number of virtual instructions for fib the runtime for fib(39) dropped from 26 seconds to 18 seconds. The assmebly code for that looks like:
0000000000207c50 <interpreter.Interpreter.impl_nop>:
207c50: 48 8b 47 60 mov rax,QWORD PTR [rdi+0x60]
207c54: c5 f8 10 00 vmovups xmm0,XMMWORD PTR [rax]
207c58: c5 f8 10 48 10 vmovups xmm1,XMMWORD PTR [rax+0x10]
207c5d: c5 f8 10 50 20 vmovups xmm2,XMMWORD PTR [rax+0x20]
207c62: c5 f8 10 58 30 vmovups xmm3,XMMWORD PTR [rax+0x30]
207c67: c5 f8 29 5c 24 e8 vmovaps XMMWORD PTR [rsp-0x18],xmm3
207c6d: c5 f8 29 54 24 d8 vmovaps XMMWORD PTR [rsp-0x28],xmm2
207c73: c5 f8 29 4c 24 c8 vmovaps XMMWORD PTR [rsp-0x38],xmm1
207c79: c5 f8 29 44 24 b8 vmovaps XMMWORD PTR [rsp-0x48],xmm0
207c7f: 48 83 c0 40 add rax,0x40
207c83: 48 89 47 60 mov QWORD PTR [rdi+0x60],rax
207c87: 48 ff 4f 68 dec QWORD PTR [rdi+0x68]
207c8b: 0f b6 44 24 f0 movzx eax,BYTE PTR [rsp-0x10]
207c90: 48 8d 74 24 b8 lea rsi,[rsp-0x48]
207c95: ff 24 c5 48 34 20 00 jmp QWORD PTR [rax*8+0x203448]
207c9c: 0f 1f 40 00 nop DWORD PTR [rax+0x0]
Geez, look at all the vmovups / vmovaps stuff. Let’s ignore that for the moment. One of the issues with that initial code is I was using slices to demarcate the beginning and end of a continuation. As we iterate over the virtual instructions we’re incrementing a pointer (the start of the continuation) but also need to decrement the slice length. But in reality we just need a single virtual instruction pointer to track where we are in virtual code meaning that this instruction dec QWORD PTR [rdi+0x68]is unneeded. So there’s definitely one instruction we can get rid of. But there still seems to be a lot going on in the above.
Back in https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/8220, haberman talks about (also see his fantastic article about parsing protobufs) how the smaller the function the more opportunity the compiler has to optimise, so small changes like removing dec could potentially allow a greater improvement than you might expect. The compiler can potentially keep commonly used arguments in registers which will be fast and prevent pushing and popping to the (native) stack. We can choose which parameters we pass in as registers (and hopefully we can keep them there).
In my PR that merged the tail call dispatch, I got rid of all the slice continuations and resort to a usize representing the operand stack pointer, label stack pointer and frame stack pointer. I also promote the (virtual) instruction pointer ip to a function parameter along with a slice of []Instruction for the current module. The nopfunction implementation then looks like:
fn nop(self: *Interpreter, ip: usize, code: []Instruction, err: *?WasmError) void {
return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_tail }, dispatch, .{ self, ip + 1, code, err });
}
This compiles to:
0000000000222fb0 <interpreter.Interpreter.nop>:
222fb0: 48 ff c6 inc rsi
222fb3: 4c 8b 02 mov r8,QWORD PTR [rdx]
222fb6: 48 8d 04 76 lea rax,[rsi+rsi*2]
222fba: 48 c1 e0 04 shl rax,0x4
222fbe: 41 0f b6 44 00 28 movzx eax,BYTE PTR [r8+rax*1+0x28]
222fc4: ff 24 c5 40 61 21 00 jmp QWORD PTR [rax*8+0x216140]
222fcb: 0f 1f 44 00 00 nop DWORD PTR [rax+rax*1+0x0]
...and you can see (partially) why we've got down from 18 seconds to 13 seconds. We no longer have the slice decrement and all the
vmovups / vmovaps crap has disappeared. It is also worth looking at perf (perf -d -d -d stat ./fib) output from previous master and comparing it to the tail call dispatch.
Previous master:
fib(39) = 63245986
Performance counter stats for './fib':
25,520.93 msec task-clock # 1.000 CPUs utilized
113 context-switches # 4.428 /sec
10 cpu-migrations # 0.392 /sec
26 page-faults # 1.019 /sec
81,344,938,138 cycles # 3.187 GHz (28.57%)
31,119,585,302 stalled-cycles-frontend # 38.26% frontend cycles idle (28.57%)
128,751,238,578 instructions # 1.58 insn per cycle
# 0.24 stalled cycles per insn (35.71%)
16,658,200,203 branches # 652.727 M/sec (35.71%)
809,936,529 branch-misses # 4.86% of all branches (35.71%)
60,359,256,646 L1-dcache-loads # 2.365 G/sec (28.56%)
4,012,985 L1-dcache-load-misses # 0.01% of all L1-dcache accesses (14.29%)
200,827 LLC-loads # 7.869 K/sec (14.29%)
<not supported> LLC-load-misses
<not supported> L1-icache-loads
4,631,769 L1-icache-load-misses (21.43%)
60,383,842,949 dTLB-loads # 2.366 G/sec (21.43%)
356,086 dTLB-load-misses # 0.00% of all dTLB cache accesses (14.29%)
449,370 iTLB-loads # 17.608 K/sec (14.29%)
255,509,966 iTLB-load-misses # 56859.60% of all iTLB cache accesses (21.43%)
<not supported> L1-dcache-prefetches
422,578 L1-dcache-prefetch-misses # 16.558 K/sec (28.57%)
25.522272275 seconds time elapsed
25.356742000 seconds user
0.000960000 seconds sys
With tail call dispatch:
fib(39) = 63245986
Performance counter stats for './fib':
12,397.63 msec task-clock # 1.000 CPUs utilized
131 context-switches # 10.567 /sec
2 cpu-migrations # 0.161 /sec
24 page-faults # 1.936 /sec
39,424,853,935 cycles # 3.180 GHz (28.56%)
10,592,820,823 stalled-cycles-frontend # 26.87% frontend cycles idle (28.56%)
78,865,250,519 instructions # 2.00 insn per cycle
# 0.13 stalled cycles per insn (35.71%)
7,680,828,125 branches # 619.540 M/sec (35.72%)
358,732,112 branch-misses # 4.67% of all branches (35.72%)
35,630,774,927 L1-dcache-loads # 2.874 G/sec (28.57%)
2,375,000 L1-dcache-load-misses # 0.01% of all L1-dcache accesses (14.29%)
393,521 LLC-loads # 31.742 K/sec (14.29%)
<not supported> LLC-load-misses
<not supported> L1-icache-loads
2,973,606 L1-icache-load-misses (21.44%)
35,648,628,162 dTLB-loads # 2.875 G/sec (21.42%)
242,155 dTLB-load-misses # 0.00% of all dTLB cache accesses (14.28%)
144,986 iTLB-loads # 11.695 K/sec (14.28%)
145,246 iTLB-load-misses # 100.18% of all iTLB cache accesses (21.41%)
<not supported> L1-dcache-prefetches
385,581 L1-dcache-prefetch-misses # 31.101 K/sec (28.55%)
12.399759040 seconds time elapsed
12.304415000 seconds user
0.002956000 seconds sys
We're not seeing much difference in branch misprediction or L1 cache misses. Rather it seems like we're just executing far fewer instructions (128,751,238,578 vs 78,865,250,519) due to better code generation.
Now, nop is the simplest instruction (almost...unreachable actually wins here because it doesn't tail call but just returns), but we don't necessarily get as clean code as this. For example loop:
0000000000223030 <interpreter.Interpreter.loop>:
223030: 41 56 push r14
223032: 53 push rbx
223033: 4c 8b 4f 40 mov r9,QWORD PTR [rdi+0x40]
223037: 4c 3b 4f 38 cmp r9,QWORD PTR [rdi+0x38]
22303b: 75 09 jne 223046 <interpreter.Interpreter.loop+0x16>
22303d: 66 c7 01 42 00 mov WORD PTR [rcx],0x42
223042: 5b pop rbx
223043: 41 5e pop r14
223045: c3 ret
223046: 4c 8b 02 mov r8,QWORD PTR [rdx]
223049: 48 8d 04 76 lea rax,[rsi+rsi*2]
22304d: 48 c1 e0 04 shl rax,0x4
223051: 4d 8b 14 00 mov r10,QWORD PTR [r8+rax*1]
223055: 4c 8b 5f 10 mov r11,QWORD PTR [rdi+0x10]
223059: 48 8b 47 30 mov rax,QWORD PTR [rdi+0x30]
22305d: 4d 29 d3 sub r11,r10
223060: 48 89 f3 mov rbx,rsi
223063: 48 c1 e3 04 shl rbx,0x4
223067: 4c 8d 34 5b lea r14,[rbx+rbx*2]
22306b: 4f 8b 44 30 10 mov r8,QWORD PTR [r8+r14*1+0x10]
223070: 49 8d 59 01 lea rbx,[r9+0x1]
223074: 48 89 5f 40 mov QWORD PTR [rdi+0x40],rbx
223078: 4b 8d 1c 49 lea rbx,[r9+r9*2]
22307c: 4c 89 14 d8 mov QWORD PTR [rax+rbx*8],r10
223080: 4c 89 44 d8 08 mov QWORD PTR [rax+rbx*8+0x8],r8
223085: 4c 89 5c d8 10 mov QWORD PTR [rax+rbx*8+0x10],r11
22308a: 48 ff c6 inc rsi
22308d: 48 8b 02 mov rax,QWORD PTR [rdx]
223090: 42 0f b6 44 30 58 movzx eax,BYTE PTR [rax+r14*1+0x58]
223096: 5b pop rbx
223097: 41 5e pop r14
223099: ff 24 c5 40 61 21 00 jmp QWORD PTR [rax*8+0x216140]
where we see some register spilling at the top of the function with those values then restored at the end of the function.
Now, I’m not sure if my choice of function parameters is optimal. I will need to do some experimentation to see if there is more speedup to be gained by careful that careful choice (this is quite hard because there’s a lot of code to change for a simple change in parameters).
The other place where we can potentially get speedup is just limiting the amount of work done by particular instructions. For example, I think call is probably doing more work than it needs to.
That will hopefully be for the next article!
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