Here's where the "implementation" cost comes in (at least in our implementation; others, of course, may have more clever ways of doing this)

-> If you pick "vl=3", then the vstart and vltrim calculations can be made one and the same

-> If you pick "vl=6" then the vstart and vltrim calculations are not exactly equal and vltrim needs a LZC on the mask for the elements within the line followed by an adder. At SEW=8b, there can be lots of elements within a line...

roger.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 6:31 PM Bill Huffman <huffman@...> wrote:

The way the discussion has been going, I think either would be permissible.  Not only that, but it would have been permissible for element 9 already to have been overwritten with 1's (if vma allows it).

I think bringing this up is good as we need to be sure what precisely we mean by the v*ff instructions.

      Bill

On 10/16/20 8:57 AM, Roger Espasa wrote:

EXTERNAL MAIL

Here's a question for the group: I did in as a picture... hopefully it will go through the mailing list:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 4:56 PM David Horner <ds2horner@...> wrote:

On 2020-10-16 10:30 a.m., krste@... wrote:
>
>>>>>> On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:48:00 -0400, "David Horner" <ds2horner@...> said:
> | First I am very happy that "arbitrary decisions by the
> | micro-architecture" allow reduction of vl to any [non-zero] value.
>
> | Even if such appear "random".
> [...]
> | A check for vl=0 on platforms that allow it is eminently doable, low
> | overhead for many use cases  AND guarantees forward progress under
> | SOFTWARE control.
>
> If we allowed implementation to return vl=0, how does software
> guarantee forward progress?

The forward progress is to advance to another task.

In the case of machine mode it can potentially "resolve" the cause of
the vl=0 return and re-execute the loop (without the overhead of the trap).


>
> | I see it as no different [in fundamental principle] than other cases
> | such as RVI integer divide by zero behaviour that does not trap but can
> | be  readily checked for.
> | Also RVI integer overflow that if you want to check for it is at most a
> | few instructions including the branch.
>
> I don't see how these examples relate to returning vl=0 on some
> microarchitectural event.  The examples here have results that depend
> only on architectural values, so can be deterministically handled.
The similarity is the avoidance of trap handling, when it is sufficient
to check instead register state.
>
> vl=0 is more related to load-reserved/store-conditional failure, where
> we need to add implementation constraints to guarantee forward
> progress.

Ok. I can see providing guidance as to when vl=0 is allowed, but not to
exclude it outright.


> Krste