Recap
In my last post I explained that modern 3D pipelines are programmable and how this has impacted graphics drivers. In the following posts we will go deeper into this aspect by looking at different parts of Mesa’s GLSL compiler. Specifically, this post will cover the GLSL parser, the Mesa IR and built-in variables and functions.
The GLSL parser
The job of the parser is to process the shader source code string provided via glShaderSource and transform it into a suitable binary representation that is stored in RAM and can be efficiently processed by other parts of the compiler in later stages.
The parser consists of a set of Lex/Yacc rules to process the incoming shader source. The lexer (glsl_parser.ll) takes care of tokenizing the source code and the parser (glsl_parser.yy) adds meaning to the stream of tokens identified in
the lexer stage.
Similarly, just like in C or C++, GLSL includes a pre-processor that goes through the shader source code before the main parser kicks in. Mesa’s implementation of the GLSL pre-processor lives in src/glsl/glcpp and is also based on Lex/Yacc rules.
The output of the parser is an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) that lives in RAM memory, which is a binary representation of the shader source code. The nodes that make this tree are defined in src/glsl/ast.h.
For someone familiar with all the Lex/Yacc stuff, the parser implementation in Mesa should feel familiar enough.
The next step takes care of converting from the AST to a different representation that is better suited for the kind of operations that drivers will have to do with it. This new representation, called the IR (Intermediate Representation), is usually referenced in Mesa as Mesa IR, GLSL IR or simply HIR.
The AST to Mesa IR conversion is driven by the code in src/glsl/ast_to_hir.cpp.
Mesa IR
The Mesa IR is the main data structure used in the compiler. Most of the work that the compiler does can be summarized as:
- Optimizations in the IR
- Modifications in the IR for better/easier integration with GPU hardware
- Linking multiple shaders (multiple IR instances) into a single program.
- Generating native assembly code for the target GPU from the IR
As we can see, the Mesa IR is at the core of all the work that the compiler has to do, so understanding how it is setup is necessary to work in this part of Mesa.
The nodes in the Mesa IR tree are defined in src/glsl/ir.h. Let’s have a look at the most important ones:
At the top of the class hierarchy for the IR nodes we have exec_node, which is Mesa’s way of linking independent instructions together in a list to make a program. This means that each instruction has previous and next pointers to the instructions that are before and after it respectively. So, we have ir_instruction, the base class for all nodes in the tree, inherit from exec_node.
Another important node is ir_rvalue, which is the base class used to represent expressions. Generally, anything that can go on the right side of an assignment is an ir_rvalue. Subclasses of ir_rvalue include ir_expression, used to represent all kinds of unary, binary or ternary operations (supported operators are defined in the ir_expression_operation enumeration), ir_texture, which is used to represent texture operations like a texture lookup, ir_swizzle, which is used for swizzling values in vectors, all the ir_dereference nodes, used to access the values stored in variables, arrays, structs, etc. and ir_constant, used to represent constants of all basic types (bool, float, integer, etc).
We also have ir_variable, which represents variables in the shader code. Notice that the definition of ir_variable is quite large… in fact, this is by large the node with the most impact in the memory footprint of the compiler when compiling shaders in large games/applications. Also notice that the IR differentiates between variables and variable dereferences (the fact of looking into a variable’s value), which are represented as an ir_rvalue.
Similarly, the IR also defines nodes for other language constructs like ir_loop, ir_if, ir_assignment, etc.
Debugging the IR is not easy, since the representation of a shader program in IR nodes can be quite complex to traverse and inspect with a debugger. To help with this Mesa provides means to print the IR to a human-readable text format. We can enable this by using the environment variable MESA_GLSL=dump. This will instruct Mesa to print both the original shader source code and its IR representation. For example:
$ MESA_GLSL=dump ./test_program
GLSL source for vertex shader 1:
#version 140
#extension GL_ARB_explicit_attrib_location : enable
layout(location = 0) in vec3 inVertexPosition;
layout(location = 1) in vec3 inVertexColor;
uniform mat4 MVP;
smooth out vec3 out0;
void main()
{
gl_Position = MVP * vec4(inVertexPosition, 1);
out0 = inVertexColor;
}
GLSL IR for shader 1:
(
(declare (sys ) int gl_InstanceID)
(declare (sys ) int gl_VertexID)
(declare (shader_out ) (array float 0) gl_ClipDistance)
(declare (shader_out ) float gl_PointSize)
(declare (shader_out ) vec4 gl_Position)
(declare (uniform ) (array vec4 56) gl_CurrentAttribFragMESA)
(declare (uniform ) (array vec4 33) gl_CurrentAttribVertMESA)
(declare (uniform ) gl_DepthRangeParameters gl_DepthRange)
(declare (uniform ) int gl_NumSamples)
(declare () int gl_MaxVaryingComponents)
(declare () int gl_MaxClipDistances)
(declare () int gl_MaxFragmentUniformComponents)
(declare () int gl_MaxVaryingFloats)
(declare () int gl_MaxVertexUniformComponents)
(declare () int gl_MaxDrawBuffers)
(declare () int gl_MaxTextureImageUnits)
(declare () int gl_MaxCombinedTextureImageUnits)
(declare () int gl_MaxVertexTextureImageUnits)
(declare () int gl_MaxVertexAttribs)
(declare (shader_in ) vec3 inVertexPosition)
(declare (shader_in ) vec3 inVertexColor)
(declare (uniform ) mat4 MVP)
(declare (shader_out smooth) vec3 out0)
(function main
(signature void
(parameters
)
(
(declare (temporary ) vec4 vec_ctor)
(assign (w) (var_ref vec_ctor) (constant float (1.000000)) )
(assign (xyz) (var_ref vec_ctor) (var_ref inVertexPosition) )
(assign (xyzw) (var_ref gl_Position)
(expression vec4 * (var_ref MVP) (var_ref vec_ctor) ) )
(assign (xyz) (var_ref out0) (var_ref inVertexColor) )
))
)
)
Notice, however, that the IR representation we get is not the one that is produced by the parser. As we will see later, that initial IR will be modified in multiple ways by Mesa, for example by adding different kinds of optimizations, so the IR that we see is the result after all these processing passes over the original IR. Mesa refers to this post-processed version of the IR as LIR (low-level IR) and to the initial version of the IR as produced by the parser as HIR (high-level IR). If we want to print the HIR (or any intermediary version of the IR as it transforms into the final LIR), we can edit the compiler and add calls to _mesa_print_ir as needed.
Traversing the Mesa IR
We mentioned before that some of the compiler’s work (a big part, in fact) has to do with optimizations and modifications of the IR. This means that the compiler needs to traverse the IR tree and identify subtrees that are relevant to this kind of operations. To achieve this, Mesa uses the visitor design pattern.
Basically, the idea is that we have a visitor object that can traverse the IR tree and we can define the behavior we want to execute when it finds specific nodes.
For instance, there is a very simple example of this in src/glsl/linker.cpp: find_deref_visitor, which detects if a variable is ever read. This involves traversing the IR, identifying ir_dereference_variable nodes (the ones where a variable’s value is accessed) and check if the name of that variable matches the one we are looking for. Here is the visitor class definition:
/**
* Visitor that determines whether or not a variable is ever read.
*/
class find_deref_visitor : public ir_hierarchical_visitor {
public:
find_deref_visitor(const char *name)
: name(name), found(false)
{
/* empty */
}
virtual ir_visitor_status visit(ir_dereference_variable *ir)
{
if (strcmp(this->name, ir->var->name) == 0) {
this->found = true;
return visit_stop;
}
return visit_continue;
}
bool variable_found() const
{
return this->found;
}
private:
const char *name; /**< Find writes to a variable with this name. */
bool found; /**< Was a write to the variable found? */
};
And this is how we get to use this, for example to check if the shader code ever reads gl_Vertex:
find_deref_visitor find("gl_Vertex");
find.run(sh->ir);
if (find.variable_found()) {
(...)
}
Most optimization and lowering passes in Mesa are implemented as visitors and follow a similar idea. We will look at examples of these in a later post.
Built-in variables and functions
GLSL defines a set of built-in variables (with ‘gl_’ prefix) for each shader stage which Mesa injects into the shader code automatically. If you look at the example where we used MESA_GLSL=dump to obtain the generated Mesa IR you can see some of these variables.
Mesa implements support for built-in variables in _mesa_glsl_initialize_variables(), defined in src/glsl/builtin_variables.cpp.
Notice that some of these variables are common to all shader stages, while some are specific to particular stages or available only in specific versions of GLSL.
Depending on the type of variable, Mesa or the hardware driver may be able to provide the value immediately (for example for variables holding constant values like gl_MaxVertexAttribs or gl_MaxDrawBuffers). Otherwise, the driver will probably have to fetch (or generate) the value for the variable from the hardware at program run-time by generating native code that is added to the user program. For example, a geometry shader that uses gl_PrimitiveID will need that variable updated for each primitive processed by the Geometry Shader unit in a draw call. To achieve this, a driver might have to generate native code that fetches the current primitive ID value from the hardware and puts stores it in the register that provides the storage for the gl_PrimitveID variable before the user code is executed.
The GLSL language also defines a number of available built-in functions that must be provided by implementators, like texture(), mix(), or dot(), to name a few examples. The entry point in Mesa’s GLSL compiler for built-in functions
is src/glsl/builtin_functions.cpp.
The method builtin_builder::create_builtins() takes care of registering built-in functions, and just like with built-in variables, not all functions are always available: some functions may only be available in certain shading units, others may only be available in certain GLSL versions, etc. For that purpose, each built-in function is registered with a predicate that can be used to test if that function is at all available in a specific scenario.
Built-in functions are registered by calling the add_function() method, which registers all versions of a specific function. For example mix() for float, vec2, vec3, vec4, etc Each of these versions has its own availability predicate. For instance, mix() is always available for float arguments, but using it with integers requires GLSL 1.30 and the EXT_shader_integer_mix extension.
Besides the availability predicate, add_function() also takes an ir_function_signature, which tells Mesa about the specific signature of the function being registered. Notice that when Mesa creates signatures for the functions it also defines the function body. For example, the following code snippet defines the signature for modf():
ir_function_signature *
builtin_builder::_modf(builtin_available_predicate avail,
const glsl_type *type)
{
ir_variable *x = in_var(type, "x");
ir_variable *i = out_var(type, "i");
MAKE_SIG(type, avail, 2, x, i);
ir_variable *t = body.make_temp(type, "t");
body.emit(assign(t, expr(ir_unop_trunc, x)));
body.emit(assign(i, t));
body.emit(ret(sub(x, t)));
return sig;
}
GLSL’s modf() splits a number in its integer and fractional parts. It assigns the integer part to an output parameter and the function return value is the fractional part.
This signature we see above defines input parameter ‘x’ of type ‘type’ (the number we want to split), an output parameter ‘i’ of the same type (which will hold the integer part of ‘x’) and a return type ‘type’.
The function implementation is based on the existence of the unary operator ir_unop_trunc, which can take a number and extract its integer part. Then it computes the fractional part by subtracting that from the original number.
When the modf() built-in function is used, the call will be expanded to include this IR code, which will later be transformed into native code for the GPU by the corresponding hardware driver. In this case, it means that the hardware driver is expected to provide an implementation of the ir_unop_trunc operator, for example, which in the case of the Intel i965 driver is implemented as a single hardware instruction (see brw_vec4_visitor.cpp or brw_fs_visitor.cpp
in src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965).
In some cases, the implementation of a built-in function can’t be defined at the IR level. In this case the implementation simply emits an ad-hoc IR node that drivers can identify and expand appropriately. An example of this is EmitVertex() in a geometry shader. This is not really a function call in the traditional sense, but a way to signal the driver that we have defined all the attributes of a vertex and it is time to “push” that vertex into the current primitive. The meaning of “pushing the vertex” is something that can’t be defined at the IR level because it will be different for each driver/hardware. Because of that, the built-in function simply injects an IR node ir_emit_vertex that drivers can identify and implement properly when the time comes. In the case of the Intel code, pushing a vertex involves a number of steps that are very intertwined with the hardware, but it basically amounts to generating native code that implements the behavior that the hardware expects for that to happen. If you are curious, the implementation of this in the i965 driver code can be found in brw_vec4_gs_visitor.cpp, in the visit() method that takes an ir_emit_vertex IR node as parameter.
Coming up next
In this post we discussed the parser, which is the entry point for the compiler, and introduced the Mesa IR, the main data structure. In following posts we will delve deeper into the GLSL compiler implementation. Specifically, we will look into the lowering and optimization passes as well as the linking process and the hooks for hardware drivers that deal with native code generation.
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