add a boxed CPU fallback kernel (#58065)
Summary:
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/58065
This PR replaces the existing code-generated CPU fallback kernels that XLA uses with a single boxed CPU fallback.
Current state: there are a couple different design ideas that I want to point out, but the logic for the actually kernel is mostly done and passing tests.
### Design
To preface, I'm not 100% tied to the current design and I'm putting the PR up now for opinions and totally open to alternatives, some of which I listed below. Actually after writing this description, I'm leaning toward the following changes:
* Confirm whether or not we can remove all C++ logging info directly in the yaml.
**Current Design**
All of the CPU fallback codegen is deleted. In its place, XLA (and other external backends, later) can choose to opt into a CPU fallback by adding the following code in a C++ file. I have an corresponding [xla-side PR with the xla changes](https://github.com/pytorch/xla/pull/2945/files#diff-1a005c10039f0cb11130a3b740f5de716d2f10acaea121017016025861886798R1).
There's no actual requirement to split up the code into a .h and .cpp file, but that's necessary in the XLA case because they sometimes need to call the fallback directly from their handcrafted kernels.
```
// xla_cpu_fallback.h
#include <ATen/native/CPUFallback.h>
...
void xla_cpu_fallback(const c10::OperatorHandle& op, torch::jit::Stack* stack);
...
```
```
// xla_cpu_fallback.cpp
#include "torch_xla/csrc/aten_cpu_fallback.h"
...
void xla_cpu_fallback(const c10::OperatorHandle& op, torch::jit::Stack* stack) {
// Do custom logging here
...
// Call the actual boxed CPU fallback.
at::native::cpu_fallback(op, stack);
}
TORCH_LIBRARY_IMPL(_, XLA, m) {
m.fallback(torch::CppFunction::makeFromBoxedFunction<&xla_cpu_fallback>());
}
```
Now that the fallback is exposed in the backend, they can call it directly. Doing so requires converting from an unboxed to a boxed context, which we provide a utility function before. E.g.:
```
#include <ATen/native/CPUFallback.h>
at::Tensor addmm(const at::Tensor& self,const at::Tensor& mat1,const at::Tensor& mat2,const at::Scalar& beta,const at::Scalar& alpha) {
....
if (...call_fallback...) {
return at::native::call_fallback_fn<&xla_cpu_fallback, decltype(at::addmm)>::call("aten::addmm", self, mat1, mat2, beta, alpha);
}
...
}
```
That `decltype(at::addmm)` logic isn't actually used everywhere in the xla-side PR yet, since you hit issues with overloads. I could use it everywhere once #58092 lands.
**Alternatives: The API for calling the CPU fallback directly is ugly, can we make it nicer?**
We could change the api to use `at::redispatch`, which would make it look something like this:
```
at::Tensor addmm(const at::Tensor& self,const at::Tensor& mat1,const at::Tensor& mat2,const at::Scalar& beta,const at::Scalar& alpha) {
....
if (...call_fallback...) {
return at::redispatch::addmm(c10::DispatchKeySet(c10::DispatchKey::CPUFallback), self, mat1, mat2, beta, alpha);
}
...
}
```
Which definitely feels cleaner, but also requires adding a new DispatchKey just for this use case. Conditionally calling the CPU fallback doesn't sound like a hugely important use case, so I don't know if giving up one of our 64 dispatch key slots is worth the API improvement. Totally open to other opinions though!
Another more mild improvement that would avoid having to pass operator string names (including overloads) around would be to codegen (yet another) namespaced API. Something like this:
```
at::Tensor addmm(const at::Tensor& self,const at::Tensor& mat1,const at::Tensor& mat2,const at::Scalar& beta,const at::Scalar& alpha) {
....
if (...call_fallback...) {
return at::fallback::addmm<&xla_cpu_fallback>(self, mat1, mat2, beta, alpha);
}
...
}
```
Writing that out actually I actually like it more (I think it'll let us get rid of `decltype(...)`). Maybe that is nice enough to warrant a new codegen API - I haven't tried adding that yet, but if people like it I'm happy to try it out.
**More alternatives**
The current design also involves the backend manually writing and registering the boxed fallback themselves, but an alternative would be for us to do it in codegen too: they would just need to pass in all of the C++ logging that they want done in the fallback, directly through the yaml. The main downsides:
* Backend code that wants to call the fallback needs to abide by whatever convention our codegen uses to name the generated boxed fallback.
* Passing custom C++ logging through yaml is just more fragile: right now xla uses an `iostream` to log each tensor arg in the operator, so we'd have to either force other backends into the same convention or figure something else out later.
To be fair, we actually already do that: XLA has custom per-tensor-arg logging for all of the generated `out` wrappers in the codegen, which we do by passing their C++ logging info through the yaml. This seems unnecessary though, since `out` wrappers just call into a functional kernel, which is hand written with its own custom logging. So my take is: try to remove custom C++ logging from the yaml, and if it turns out to be really necessary, then we may as well take advantage of that to codegen the fallback.
### Performance impact
While ops that fall back to CPU aren't exactly hot path, we probably don't want to use a boxed fallback if it turns out to be an absolute perf killer.
I ran my benchmarks using callgrind, benchmarking both `at::add` and `at::add_out` run on XLA. My callgrind benchmark for `at::add` can be found here (the add_out benchmark looks basically the same): https://www.internalfb.com/phabricator/paste/view/P415418587. I created the benchmark by hacking the existing xla C++ test build scripts and throwing in a reference to callgrind.
I also attached the full callgrind output for each benchmark; the full output is actually pretty noise and hard to parse, but I focused on everything underneath the `at::add()` call in the output, which was much more stable. My guess is that it's due to some heavyweight async startup processing that xla does.
`at::add`:
before: 88,505,130 instructions. Full output: https://www.internalfb.com/phabricator/paste/view/P415421001
after: 102,185,654 instructions. Full output: https://www.internalfb.com/phabricator/paste/view/P415421273
delta: ~15.5% increase
`at::add_out`:
before: 63,897,395 instructions. Full output: https://www.internalfb.com/intern/everpaste/?handle=GBrrKwtAPlix9wUEAOZtrFXpdO5UbsIXAAAz
after: 73,170,346 instructions. Full output: https://www.internalfb.com/phabricator/paste/view/P415423227
delta: ~14.5% increase
High level takeaway: A framework overhead increase of 10-20% doesn't seem too horrible for the CPU fallback use case.
For structured, functional ops that requires a CPU fallback, we're actually in an unfortunate situation: we're doing even more work than necessary. Our codegen automatically creates a `CompositeExplicitAutograd` kernel which calls into the `out` operator. So the extra work that we end up doing is:
* An extra dispatcher hop: (at::add -> CompositeExplicitAutograd -> CPUFallback -> at::native::add) instead of (at::add -> CPUFallback -> at::native::add)
* An unnecessary tensor allocation (the CompositeExplicitAutograd kernel uses at::empty() to create an output tensor, which is immediately overwritten by the CPU fallback)
* An unnecessary meta() call (the CompositeExplicitAutograd kernel calls it to create the output tensor, but we call it again in the CPU kernel).
* unboxing->boxing->unboxing logic (this is the only strictly required piece)
There are definitely ways to avoid the unnecessary work explained above: one would be to give the boxed fallback higher priority than composite keys (there's [an issue for it here](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/55104)), and codegen fallthroughs for all composite ops. It'll require more infra to set up, so I see it as more of a perf knob that we can apply if we need it later.
Unfortunately I couldn't dig much deeper into the differences aside from the aggregate change in instructions, since it looks like callgrind fudged some of the instruction attribution (`at::to_cpu` takes up a ton of instructions, but I don't see any attribution for the `at::native::add` kernel anywhere).
Test Plan: Imported from OSS
Reviewed By: jbschlosser
Differential Revision: D28833085
Pulled By: bdhirsh
fbshipit-source-id: 537ebd5d7fb5858f1158764ff47132d503c3b92b
