Progress on the OpenPOWER SpiderMonkey JIT

Progress!

% gdb --args obj/dist/bin/js --no-baseline --no-ion --no-native-regexp --blinterp-eager -e 'print("hello world")'
GNU gdb (GDB) Fedora 10.1-14.fc34
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "ppc64le-redhat-linux-gnu".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
    <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.

For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from obj/dist/bin/js...
(gdb) run
Starting program: obj/dist/bin/js --no-baseline --no-ion --no-native-regexp --blinterp-eager -e print\(\"hello\ world\"\)
warning: Expected absolute pathname for libpthread in the inferior, but got .gnu_debugdata for /lib64/libpthread.so.0.
warning: Unable to find libthread_db matching inferior's thread library, thread debugging will not be available.
[New LWP 2797069]
[LWP 2797069 exited]
[New LWP 2797070]
[New LWP 2797071]
[New LWP 2797072]
[New LWP 2797073]
[New LWP 2797074]
[New LWP 2797075]
[New LWP 2797076]
[New LWP 2797077]
hello world
[LWP 2797072 exited]
[LWP 2797070 exited]
[LWP 2797074 exited]
[LWP 2797077 exited]
[LWP 2797073 exited]
[LWP 2797071 exited]
[LWP 2797076 exited]
[LWP 2797075 exited]
[Inferior 1 (process 2797041) exited normally]

This may not look like much, but it demonstrates that the current version of the OpenPOWER JavaScript JIT for Firefox can emit machine language instructions correctly (mostly — still more codegen bugs to shake out), handles the instruction cache correctly, handles ABI-compliant calls into the SpiderMonkey VM correctly (the IonMonkey JIT is not ABI-compliant except at those edges), and enters and exits routines without making a mess of the stack. Much of the code originates from TenFourFox's "IonPower" 32-bit PowerPC JIT, though obviously greatly expanded, and there is still ongoing work to make sure it is properly 64-bit aware and takes advantage of instructions available in later versions of the Power ISA. (No more spills to the stack to convert floating point, for example. Yay for VSX!)

Although it is only the lowest level of the JIT, what Mozilla calls the Baseline Interpreter, there is substantial code in common between the Baseline Interpreter and the second-stage Baseline Compiler. Because it has much less overhead compared to Baseline Compiler and to the full-fledged Ion JIT, the Baseline Interpreter can significantly improve page loads all by itself. In fact, my next step might be to get regular expressions and the OpenPOWER Baseline Interpreter to pass the test suite and then drag that into a current version of Firefox for continued work so that it can get banged on for reliability and improve performance for those people who want to build it (analogous to how we got PPCBC running first before full-fledged IonPower in TenFourFox). Eventually full Ion JIT and Wasm support should follow, though those both use rather different codepaths apart from the fundamental portions of the backend which still need to be shaped.

A big shout-out goes to Justin Hibbits, who took TenFourFox's code and merged it with the work I had initially done on JitPower way back in the Firefox 62 days but was never able to finish. With him having done most of the grunt work, I was able to get it to compile and then started attacking the various bugs in it.

Want to contribute? It's on Github. Tracing down bugs is labour-intensive, and involves a lot of emitting trap instructions and single-stepping in the debugger, but when you see those small steps add up into meaningful fixes (man, it was great to see those two words appear) it's really rewarding. I'm happy to give tips to anyone who wants to participate. Once it can pass the test suite at some JIT level, it will be time to forward-port it and if we can get our skates on it might even be possible to upstream it into the next Firefox ESR.

For better or worse, the Web is a runtime. Let's get OpenPOWER workstations running it better.