Best as I can tell (e.g. from LeakSanitizer), this fixes all the leaks
except for those due to buffers created internally to the codegenned
code itself (up next I'll add the buffer deallocation pass to fix
those).
The main change is that instead of attempting to pass `refbackrt::Tensor`
to the codegenned function directly, we make all the ABI types be
UnrankedMemRef which gets passed awkwardly (but workably) as a
`{size_t rank, void *ptrToDescriptor}` on the ABI. The reason why
refbackrt::Tensor wasn't workable is that is that MLIR doesn't really
have a way to deal with the lifetime of unranked memref descriptors that
happen inside the function, which is inevitably what would happen in the
old code that would emit runtime calls to
`refbackrt.to_memref/refbackrt.from_memref` to convert back and forth to
`refbackrt::Tensor` inside the codegenned code.
So, instead of the `refbackrt.to_memref/refbackrt.from_memref` with no
real sound basis for valid lifetime management, we now have a lovely
piece of code in `refbackrt::invoke` in `Runtime.cpp` that just barely
seems to be sound. We rely on the codegenned code having these
properties, which it seems to have:
- it won't free memref descriptors or their backing buffer for arguments
of UnrankedMemRef type.
- it will allocate a separate memref descriptor for each result
UnrankedMemRef (which is ensured by having a separate memref_cast for
each)
- we can sniff the `allocatedPtr`'s (i.e. the backing buffer pointers)
to avoid double-freeing in the case of aliasing of the backing buffer
(including backing buffers for arguments feeding into results)
- to catch the case of statically allocated data (which we need to avoid
passing to `free`) , check if the `allocatedPtr` is (no joke) equal to
`0xDEADBEEF`, because there is otherwise no way to distinguish
statically allocated from malloc'ed data... (std.global_memref lowering
to LLVM by happenstance sets the allocatedPtr equal to `0xDEADBEEF`,
presumably mainly as a debugging thing)
Even with all this, we *still* need to (internally to refbackrt::invoke)
make copies of all inputs/outputs! And the details of how the LLVM-level
ABI gets laid out for e.g. function arguments/returns is still super
tricky.
This really highlights how deficient memref is as the general runtime
type for our use case. It's stewing in my mind how best to improve the
situation. My general gut feeling is that IREE's abstractions for this
are "right", but I need to think more how to distill those aspects of
IREE's design in a "reference" way for RefBackend.
Some implementation notes:
- In terms of how this is implemented, this did catch a bug in our ABI
wrapper functions in LowerToLLVM.cpp, which I had to fix (it happened to
work before through some combination of npcomprt::Tensor being passed as
a single pointer + probably me infinite-monkey-ing it until it worked)
- This actually removes 2 out of the 3 compiler runtime functions (the
only one left is "abort_if". (most of the memref descriptor code moved
from CopmilerRuntime.cpp to Runtime.cpp)
- this also means deleting `refbackrt.from_memref` and
`refbackrt.to_memref`
This vastly simplifies our code, allowing deleting multiple ops,
simplifying multiple passes, and removing a whole pass.
Now `refback` dialect is down to one op (refback.alloc_memref, which
simplifies allocations to just take a shape instead of individual
extents).
I now realize that VerboseCamelCase is not the best choice for dialect
directory/file names and C++ identifiers (take e.g. "Linalg", "Basicpy",
etc. as prior art here; not LinearAlgebra or BasicPython). If I had to
name the convention it seems to be "Shortword" (or of course just
acronym dialects like LLVM, SCF, etc.).
This rename also has the side benefit of differentiating RefBackend
directories, which now refer to the actual backend itself, from
Refback/Refbackrt, which are the dialects which happen to be used by
that backend.
Sean Silva
Stella Laurenzo