News: 0001554474

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Intel Cleans Up LLVM/Clang For Misreporting CLDEMOTE On Arrow Lake & Future Hybrid CPUs

([Intel] 2 Hours Ago CLDEMOTE)


Code compilers like the prominent GCC and LLVM/Clang have been advertising support for the Cache Line Demote "CLDEMOTE" instruction on Arrow Lake processors as well as Lunar Lake and upcoming Panther Lake hybrid processors. Intel engineers added that compiler plumbing but was inaccurate and inadvertently missed until now with this prominent instruction not being supported there.

The CLDEMOTE instruction allows for the OS to tell the CPU core to demote a specified cache line to a higher cache level further away from the core. CLDEMOTE was found beginning with Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors and can be helpful for system performance.

The compiler patches for GCC and LLVM/Clang have advertised CLDEMOTE being found with Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and upcoming Panther Lake but is inaccurate. That compiler enablement work was originally submitted years ago by Intel engineers but turned out to be inaccurate. This slipped under my radar too but when checking tonight on my Arrow Lake systems, CLDEMOTE support is indeed not advertised by the processor.

[1]Intel engineer Phoebe Wang landed a patch today within LLVM Git via [2]this pull request to now remove the presence of CLDEMOTE from "arrowlake" targeting as well as future Intel hybrid CPU models. This also splits up the Arrow Lake and Intel Xeon E "Sierra Forest" handling with that Xeon E-core processor supporting CLDEMOTE.

[3]

The GCC compiler is still advertising and will attempt to use CLDEMOTE on Arrow Lake and later too, but presumably will see a similar patch soon for removing the presence of CLDEMOTE on those Intel Core Ultra CPUs too.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=cldemote_arrowlake_clang_lrg

[2] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/144833

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=cldemote_arrowlake_gcc_lrg



phoronix

A mother mouse was taking her large brood for a stroll across the kitchen
floor one day when the local cat, by a feat of stealth unusual even for
its species, managed to trap them in a corner. The children cowered,
terrified by this fearsome beast, plaintively crying, "Help, Mother!
Save us! Save us! We're scared, Mother!"
Mother Mouse, with the hopeless valor of a parent protecting its
children, turned with her teeth bared to the cat, towering huge above them,
and suddenly began to bark in a fashion that would have done any Doberman
proud. The startled cat fled in fear for its life.
As her grateful offspring flocked around her shouting "Oh, Mother,
you saved us!" and "Yay! You scared the cat away!" she turned to them
purposefully and declared, "You see how useful it is to know a second
language?"