Re: [RFC PATCH v2] target/ppc: Enable hardfloat for PPC

[Programmingkid <programmingkidx@gmail.com>]

> On Feb 18, 2020, at 12:10 PM, BALATON Zoltan <balaton@eik.bme.hu> wrote:
> 
> While other targets take advantage of using host FPU to do floating
> point computations, this was disabled for PPC target because always
> clearing exception flags before every FP op made it slightly slower
> than emulating everyting with softfloat. To emulate some FPSCR bits,
> clearing of fp_status may be necessary (unless these could be handled
> e.g. using FP exceptions on host but there's no API for that in QEMU
> yet) but preserving at least the inexact flag makes hardfloat usable
> and faster than softfloat. Since most clients don't actually care
> about this flag, we can gain some speed trading some emulation
> accuracy.
> 
> This patch implements a simple way to keep the inexact flag set for
> hardfloat while still allowing to revert to softfloat for workloads
> that need more accurate albeit slower emulation. (Set hardfloat
> property of CPU, i.e. -cpu name,hardfloat=false for that.) There may
> still be room for further improvement but this seems to increase
> floating point performance. Unfortunately the softfloat case is slower
> than before this patch so this patch only makes sense if the default
> is also set to enable hardfloat.
> 
> Because of the above this patch at the moment is mainly for testing
> different workloads to evaluate how viable would this be in practice.
> Thus, RFC and not ready for merge yet.
> 
> Signed-off-by: BALATON Zoltan <balaton@eik.bme.hu>
> ---
> v2: use different approach to avoid needing if () in
> helper_reset_fpstatus() but this does not seem to change overhead
> much, also make it a single patch as adding the hardfloat option is
> only a few lines; with this we can use same value at other places where
> float_status is reset and maybe enable hardfloat for a few more places
> for a little more performance but not too much. With this I got:

<snip>

Thank you for working on this. It is about time we have a better FPU. 

I applied your patch over David Gibson's ppc-for-5.0 branch. It applied cleanly and compiled easily.

Tests were done on a Mac OS 10.4.3 VM. The CPU was set to G3. 

I did several tests and here are my results:

With hard float:
- The USB audio device does not produce any sound. 
- Converting a MIDI file to AAC in iTunes happens at 0.4x (faster than soft float :) ).
For my FPSCR test program, 21 tests failed. The high number is because the inexact exception is being set for situations it should not be set for.

With soft float:
- Some sound can be heard from the USB audio device. It isn't good sounding. I had to force quit Quicktime player because it stopped working.
- Converting a MIDI file to AAC in iTunes happens at 0.3x (slower than hard float).
- 13 tests failed with my FPSCR test program.

This patch is a good start. I'm not worried about the Floating Point Status and Control Register flags being wrong since hardly any software bothers to check them. I think more optimizations can happen by simplifying the FPU. As it is now it makes a lot of calls per operation.