tree ca5f4012bbd24e625cf51fcb4895f673e4ef1c0e
parent b98f0d3d7c3b85001382eadd7dcfa3e11de64ca5
author Jason Ekstrand <jason@jlekstrand.net> 1604639971 -0600
committer Marge Bot <eric+marge@anholt.net> 1604948331 +0000

intel/nir: Lower 8-bit ops to 16-bit in NIR on Gen11+

Intel hardware supports 8-bit arithmetic but it's tricky and annoying:

  - Byte operations don't actually execute with a byte type.  The
    execution type for byte operations is actually word.  (I don't know
    if this has implications for the HW implementation.  Probably?)

  - Destinations are required to be strided out to at least the
    execution type size.  This means that B-type operations always have
    a stride of at least 2.  This means wreaks havoc on the back-end in
    multiple ways.

  - Thanks to the strided destination, we don't actually save register
    space by storing things in bytes.  We could, in theory, interleave
    two byte values into a single 2B-strided register but that's both a
    pain for RA and would lead to piles of false dependencies pre-Gen12
    and on Gen12+, we'd need some significant improvements to the SWSB
    pass.

  - Also thanks to the strided destination, all byte writes are treated
    as partial writes by the back-end and we don't know how to copy-prop
    them.

  - On Gen11, they added a new hardware restriction that byte types
    aren't allowed in the 2nd and 3rd sources of instructions.  This
    means that we have to emit B->W conversions all over to resolve
    things.  If we emit said conversions in NIR, instead, there's a
    chance NIR can get rid of some of them for us.

We can get rid of a lot of this pain by just asking NIR to get rid of
8-bit arithmetic for us.  It may lead to a few more conversions in some
cases but having back-end copy-prop actually work is probably a bigger
bonus.  There is still a bit we have to handle in the back-end.  In
particular, basic MOVs and conversions because 8-bit load/store ops
still require 8-bit types.

Reviewed-by: Kenneth Graunke <kenneth@whitecape.org>
Part-of: <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/7482>