How to compile opencl-kernel-file(.cl) to LLVM IR - opencl

This question is related to LLVM/clang.
I already know how to compile opencl-kernel-file(.cl) using OpenCL API ( clBuildProgram() and clGetProgramBuildInfo() )
my question is this:
How to compile opencl-kernel-file(.cl) to LLVM IR with OpenCL 1.2 or higher?
In the other words, How to compile opnecl-kernel-file(.cl) to LLVM IR without libclc?
I have tried various methods to get LLVM-IR of OpenCL-Kernel-File.
I first followed the clang user manual.(https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#opencl-features) but it did not run.
Secondly, I found a way to use libclc.
commands is this:
clang++ -emit-llvm -c -target -nvptx64-nvidial-nvcl -Dcl_clang_storage_class_specifiers -include /usr/local/include/clc/clc.h -fpack-struct=64 -o "$#".bc "$#" <br>
llvm-link "$#".bc /usr/local/lib/clc/nvptx64--nvidiacl.bc -o "$#".linked.bc <br>
llc -mcpu=sm_52 -march=nvptx64 "$#".linked.bc -o "$#".nvptx.s<br>
This method worked fine, but since libclc was built on top of the OpenCL 1.1 specification, it could not be used with OpenCL 1.2 or later code such as code using printf.
And this method uses libclc, which implements OpenCL built-in functions in the shape of new function. You can observe that in the assembly(ptx) of result opencl binary, it goes straight to the function call instead of converting it to an inline assembly. I am concerned that this will affect gpu behavior and performance, such as execution time.
So now I am looking for a way to replace compilation using libclc.
As a last resort, I'm considering using libclc with the NVPTX backend and AMDGPU backend of LLVM.
But if there is already another way, I want to use it.
(I expect that the OpenCL front-end I have not found yet exists in clang)
My program's scenarios are:
There is opencl kernel source file(.cl)
Compile the file to LLVM IR
IR-Level process to the IR
Compile(using llc) the IR to Binary
with each gpu targets(nvptx, amdgcn..)
Using the binary, Run host(.c or .cpp with lib OpenCL) with clCreateProgramWithBinary()
Now, When I compile kernel source file to LLVM IR, I have to include header of libclc(-include option in first one of above command) for compiling built-in functions. And I have to link libclc libraries before compile IR to binary
My environments are below:
GTX960
- NVIDIA's Binary appears in nvptx format
- I'm using sm_52 nvptx for my gpu.
Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS
LLVM/Clang 5.0.0
- If there is another way, I am willing to change the LLVM version.
Thanks in advice!

Clang 9 (and up) can compile OpenCL kernels written in the OpenCL C language. You can tell Clang to emit LLVM-IR by passing the -emit-llvm flag (add -S to output the IR in text rather than in bytecode format), and specify which version of the OpenCL standard using e.g. -cl-std=CL2.0. Clang currently supports up to OpenCL 2.0.
By default, Clang will not add the standard OpenCL headers, so if your kernel uses any of the OpenCL built-in functions you may see an error like the following:
clang-9 -c -x cl -emit-llvm -S -cl-std=CL2.0 my_kernel.cl -o my_kernel.ll
my_kernel.cl:17:12: error: implicit declaration of function 'get_global_id' is invalid in OpenCL
int i = get_global_id(0);
^
1 error generated.
You can tell Clang to include the standard OpenCL headers by passing the -finclude-default-header flag to the Clang frontend, e.g.
clang-9 -c -x cl -emit-llvm -S -cl-std=CL2.0 -Xclang -finclude-default-header my_kernel.cl -o my_kernel.ll

(I expect that the OpenCL front-end I have not found yet exists in clang)
There is an OpenCL front-end in clang - and you're using it, otherwise you couldn't compile a single line of OpenCL with clang. Frontend is Clang recognizing the OpenCL language. There is no OpenCL backend of any kind in LLVM, it's not the job of LLVM; it's the job of various OpenCL implementations to provide proper libraries. Clang+LLVM just recognizes the language and compiles it to bitcode & machine binaries, that's all it does.
in the assembly(ptx) of result opencl binary, it goes straight to the function call instead of converting it to an inline assembly.
You could try linking to a different library instead of libclc, if you find one. Perhaps NVidia's CUDA has some bitcode libraries somewhere, then again licensing issues... BTW are you 100% sure you need LLVM IR ? getting OpenCL binaries using the OpenCL runtime, or using SPIR-V, might get you faster binaries & certainly be less painful to work with. Even if you manage to get a nice LLVM IR, you'll need some runtime which actually accepts it (i could be wrong, but i doubt proprietary AMD/NVIDIA OpenCL will just accept random LLVM IR as inputs).

Clang does not provide a standard CL declaration header file (for example, C's stdio.h), which is why you're getting "undefined type float" and whatnot.
If you get one such header, you can then mark it as implicit include using "clang -include cl.h -x cl [your filename here]"
One such declaration header can be retrieved from the reference OpenCL compiler implementation at
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIR-Tools/blob/master/headers/opencl_spir.h
And by the way, consider using this compiler which generates SPIR (albeit 1.0) which can be fed into OpenCL drivers as input.

Related

Crystal-lang: why is the LLVM "hello.bc" not the same if generated by Crystal or by clang?

this is my first Stackoverflow question :-)
My background:
2 years Python experience
2 months crystal-lang experience ( websites running with Amber framework )
1 month into C, C++ , assembly
Facts:
- crystal-lang is compiling and running without any problem
- running on x86_64
Please be nice, as i don't have much low-level language knowledge yet.
From my understanding, when we compile and run a basic hello.c file using LLVM, it goes as follow:
hello.c :
#include
int main() {
printf("hello world\n");
return 0;
}
shell :
$ clang -O3 -emit-llvm hello.c -c -o hello.bc
$ llc hello.bc -o hello.s
$ gcc hello.s -o hello.native
$ ./hello.native
this comes from the LLVM examples )
My point is that we can produce a pretty short hello.bc file (128 lines) that can be run in a slower way using:
$ lli hello.bc
but when I tried to generate a similar hello.bc from a hello.cr file and run it like i did with the hello.c file:
hello.cr :
puts "hello world"
shell :
$ crystal build hello.cr --emit llvm-bc --release
$ llc hello.bc -o hello.s
what i noticed:
This hello.bc file is much much bigger than the one generating from the c file (43'624 lines)
This hello.bc can't be run using "lli" as it generates an:
"LLVM ERROR: Program used external function 'pcre_malloc' which could not be resolved!
I can't even compile from hello.s to hello.native
Same problem if i try to use generate and hello.ll file
As i understood, LLVM is portable , and that all front-end languages would produce an intermediate *.bc that can then be compiled to any architecture.
My questions are:
Why are the hello.bc not similar in both cases ?
Am I doing something wrong in the crystal procedure ?
Thank you!
Everything is just as it is supposed to be. Crystal has a runtime library that is always present even if you didn't include anything. This is required to run the Crystal program.
The C example pretty much doesn't contain anything else than a syscall to printf. That's why the compiled ASM is also really tiny.
Crystal's simple puts call has a much more behind it. It is based on libraries for handling asynchronous IO, concurrency, signal handling, garbage collection and more. Some of these libraries are completely implemented in the Crystal standard library, some use other libraries that are either directly embedded into the binary (libgc) or still require dynamic libraries from the system (libpcre, libpthread).
Any Crystal program comes with this runtime library by default. Even an empty program. This usually goes completely unnoticed because larger programs will eventually need those things anyway and the compiled binary size of the runtime library is less than 500 KB (in release mode).
Such a small program like yours doesn't really need all of this just to print a string. But these libraries are required for the Crystal runtime.
NOTE: You can compile a Crystal program without these default libraries. But this means you can't use anything from the Crystal stdlib and you have to essentially write C code with Crystal syntax (or implement your own stdlib):
require "lib_c"
require "c/stdio"
LibC.printf pointerof("hello world".#c)
This can be compiled with --prelude=empty option and it will generate a substantially smaller ASM, roughly similar to the C example.

gfortran -fcray-pointer, best way to use pointers in fortran?

I am not a fan of NEEDING numerous compiler flags to get a program to compile. I generally see it as poor programming practice.
I have some old fortran code that uses the POINTER statement and when using gfortran to compile these files it responds with the error
Error: Cray pointer declaration at (1) requires -fcray-pointer flag
here is a sample of what is causing it
COMPLEX*16 matrix(1)
POINTER (PM, mymatrix)
COMMON /M_SHARED/ PM
if I use the intel compiler then there is no problem doing just ifort -O3 myprogram.f but I don't want to be dependent on needing the intel compiler. I would prefer to be able to use gfortran which is free.
I would like to know how far behind the times my example is, and how it should be written properly. Or should i just use the -fcray-pointer flag?

Is there an offlineOpenCL compiler (for NVIDIA graphics cards)?

The normal way to run an OpenCL program is to include the openCL kernel that is compiled at runtime (online compilation).
But I've seen examples of compiling OpenCL to binary before, called offline compilation. I'm aware of the disadvantages (reducing compatibility across hardware).
There used to be an offline compiler at http://www.fixstars.com/en/ but it does not seems to be available anymore.
So is there an offline compiler for OpenCL available, in particular for NVIDIA-based cards?
Someone suggested that nvcc.exe in NVidia's CUDA SDK could compile .cl files with
nvcc -x cu file.cl -o file.out -lOpenCL
...but it says missing cl.exe at least on Windows. This might be worth checking out, however: http://clcc.sourceforge.net/
As well as:
https://github.com/HSAFoundation/CLOC (AMD-maintained offline compiler)
https://github.com/Maratyszcza/clcc (includes also links to above ones and more)

OpenCL kernel compiler optimisations

I'm using OpenCL on OS X, I was wondering if someone could tell me the compiler which is used to generate the GPU binary from the OpenCL kernel source code? In OS X is the OpenCL kernel compiled to LLVM first then optimized and then finally compiled to GPU native code? Also I was wondering if the OpenCL kernel compiler does optimisations on the kernel such as loop invariant code motion?
Yes, on Mac OS X all OpenCL code is compiled to LLVM IR, which is then passed to device-specific optimizations and code generation.
You can generate LLVM bitcode files offline, and use the result in clCreateProgramWithBinary. The openclc compiler is inside the OpenCL framework (/System/Library/Framework/OpenCL.framework/Libraries/openclc). You need these options (arch can be i386, x86_64, gpu_32):
openclc -c -o foo.bc -arch gpu_32 -emit-llvm foo.cl

How a recent version of GCC (4.6) could be used together with Qt under Mac OS?

My problem is related to the one discussed here:
Is there a way that OpenMP can operate on Qt spanwed threads?
Upon trying to run my Qt-based program under Mac OS that has an OpenMP clause in a secondary thread, it crashed. After browsing through the web, now I understand that it is caused by a bug in the rather old version (4.2) of gcc supplied by Apple.
Then I downloaded the latest 4.6 version of gcc from http://hpc.sourceforge.net and tried to compile the project, but I got the following errors from g++ compiler:
unrecognized option ‘-arch’
unrecognized option ‘-Xarch_x86_64’
I learned that this is because these are options, which can be only interpreted by the custom-configured Apple-gcc compiler, but not by standard gcc.
Could anybody please help me could I overcome this issue and configure g++ 4.6 to use with Qt in order to get a bug-free OpenMP support? I admit that I'm a newbie under Mac OS platform with regard to compilers and programming and would like to port my code from Visual Studio-Qt environment.
Many thanks in advance!
If you aren't afraid of messing with your Qt installation, then change the QMAKE_CFLAGS_X86_64 entry in ~/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.1/gcc/mkspecs/common/g++-macx.conf.
Replace ‘-Xarch_x86_64’ with ‘-arch x86_64’.
You can use your non-Apple gcc v4.6 and compile a binary for each architecture you want to build (use --target=${ARCH} should be fine for i386 and x86_64). Then once you have a binary for each of the architectures use lipo like so:
lipo -create -arch i386 binary_32bit -arch x86_64 binary_64bit -output binary_universal
This will create a fat binary (aka universal binary) named binary_universal from binary_32bit and binary_64bit.
Or you could use clang/llvm instead of gcc, which probably won't have the bug you described and (if supplied via Apple's developer tools) should be able to compile universal binaries directly.
You should run qmake woth corresponding -spec option, for example, to use gcc46 on freebsd it is needed to run qmake so:
qmake --spec=freebsd-g++46
Lipo can indeed be used to put multiple object files together into a "fat" object file, in fact it turns out this is just what apple's compiler does. Their GCC compiler is actually a driver that maps various architectures to the appropriate compiler for the architecture and then mashes the objects together using lipo.
see: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2011-September/016210.html
Here is the source file for that driver:
http://opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5666.3/driverdriver.c
All one needs to do to get a new version of GCC to honor the -arch flag is to modify this driver and get it to point to a script wrapper for your version of gcc that adds the appropriate flags for the given architecture and then passes all the rest of the arguments. Something like this:
#!/bin/sh
/opt/local/bin/gcc-mp-4.6 -m32 $#
and
#!/bin/sh
/opt/local/bin/gcc-mp-4.6 -m64 $#
Here is a link that talks about how to do it, and provides a cmake project to easily get the macports version of GCC fixed up and supporting the -arch flag for the two intel architectures:
http://thecoderslife.blogspot.com/2015/07/building-with-gcc-46-and-xcode-4.html

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