I forgot to mention that I fired off a gem5.debug run before I went to bed
last night, and it completed successfully.  So it does appear to be the
optimizer.

Steve

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Gabe Black <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 10/25/11 22:28, Ali Saidi wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:53:29 -0700, Gabe Black <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> >> On 10/25/11 07:46, Steve Reinhardt wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 2:30 AM, Gabe Black <[email protected]>
> >>> wrote:
> >
> >>>> I'm currently building binutils for SPARC, so hopefully I can
> >>>> disassemble some things and get a better idea of what's going on. It's
> >>>> probably going to be really annoying to figure it out.
> >>>
> >>> If it's really just an FP rounding error, it might not be that
> >>> hard... just
> >>> look at the examples from the trace of where it's going wrong,
> >>> figure out
> >>> what the right answer is, and focus on those few instructions.  FP
> >>> is pretty
> >>> thoroughly specified by IEEE, so if it's not an outright compiler
> >>> bug, maybe
> >>> it's just some change in the default rounding settings or something.
> >>
> >> Yeah, I think ISAs treat IEEE as a really good suggestion rather than a
> >> standard. ARM isn't strictly conformant, and neither is x86. The default
> >> rounding mode *is* standard, though, and I don't think is adjusted in
> >> SPARC as a result of execution. If it changed somehow (unless I'm
> >> forgetting where SPARC does that) it's a fairly significant problem.
> >> Whether instructions generate +/- 0 in various situations may depend on,
> >> for instance, what order gcc decides to put the operands. I'm not sure
> >> that it does, but there are all kinds of weird, subtle behaviors with
> >> FP, and you can't just fix how add works if x86 picked the wrong thing.
> >> Then you have to replace add, or semi-replace it by faking it out with
> >> other FP operations. If we're running real x87 instructions (we
> >> shouldn't be in 64 bit mode, but we still could) then those use 80 bit
> >> operands internally. Where and when rounding takes place depends on when
> >> those are moved in/out of the FPU, and will be different than true 64
> >> bit operands. SSE based FP uses real 64 bit doubles, so that should
> >> behave better. It should also be the default in 64 bit mode since the
> >> compiler can assume some basic SSE support is present.
> >
> > The rounding mode in SPARC is controlled by bits 31:30 of the FSR. My
> > guess is that this is actually the problem and gcc 4.5+ is doing some
> > code motion that is moving the actual fp code around our setting of
> > the rounding mode. Using one of the asm tricks to prevent code
> > movement (supposedly an empty asm() is supposed to be  code barrier in
> > gcc), might fix the problem. I don't have time to try it, but
> > src/arch/sparc/isa/formats/basic.isa:145 looks like the right place.
> > Also, trying to run the regression with m5.debug might see if the
> > optimizer is at fault.
> >
> > Ali
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gem5-dev mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
>
> Ah, ok, so we do set the mode apparently. I'll try gem5.debug and also
> look at that template and see what I can see. Thanks Ali!
>
> Gabe
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