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help on detecting stalls(identifying structural hazards) in assembly code

ddmetro
Beginner
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Hi All,
Our project is to optimize instruction scheduling in gcc by detecting structural hazards. We are trying to come up with a test case for the same, a scenario wherein one of the instructions is stalled due to the resource being used by some other instruction. However, we are unable to do so.

1. We wrote a C program - doing - floating point multiplications, divisions and additions. However in both the files - 'progname.s' file and 'progname.c.190r.sched2' file, the instructions were scheduled for execution in sequential order. We couldn't find a way to detect a stall, by looking at the assembly code generated.
Question: How do we detect that a stall has occurred if execution is being carried out in a particular sequence?
Also we would like to know of a tool, which given a 'progname.s' file, gives details of the execution time of each instruction and the clock cycle in which stall will occur, if execution is carried out in this sequence.

2. We saw that integer operations were already being performed during compilation. Hence we were left with only floating point operations to be looked into for structural hazards.
Question: Once a stall is detected in case of floating point unit being used currently by some other instruction, which instruction can be scheduled in so as to avoid this stall(since integer operations are performed at compile time and floating point units are being used)?

Target machine architecture: 686
Working on: Intel Pentium Dual Core processor

Thanking you,
Dhiraj
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TimP
Honored Contributor III
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In spite the age of your CPU, you should be able to use VTune or oprofile to diagnose these performance issues. It was an out-of-order processor, so had no direct relationship between scheduling of instructions and run-time performance. If you are interested in this kind of work, the Atom CPU might make more sense. You must have seen suggestions in other threads here about static analysis tools for near future CPUs.
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