This document lists technical details regarding the Metal HAL driver. Note that the Metal HAL driver is working in progress; this document is expected to be updated along the way.
IREE provides a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) as a common interface to different compute accelerators. IREE HAL's design draws inspiration from modern GPU architecture and APIs; so implementing a HAL driver using modern GPU APIs is generally straightforward. This applies to the Metal HAL driver.
The Metal HAL driver expects Metal 2+. Metal 2 introduces useful features like argument buffer, performance shaders, and others, that can improve performance and make IREE HAL implementation simpler. Metal 2 was released late 2017 and are supported since macOS High Sierra and iOS 11. It is already dominant (macOS, iOS) right now.
The Metal HAL driver lives under the iree/hal/metal/ directory. Header (.h) and implementation (.mm) files are put adjacent to each other.
The Metal framework only exposes Objective-C or Swift programming language APIs. Metal HAL driver needs to inherit from common HAL abstraction classes, which are C++. So we use Objective-C++ for implementing the Metal HAL driver. The headers try to stay with pure C/C++ syntax when possible, except for #import <Metal/Metal.h> and using Metal id types.
Objective-C uses refcount for tracking object lifetime and managing memory. This is traditionally done manually by sending retain and release messages to Objective-C objects. Modern Objective-C allows developers to opt in to use Automatic Reference Counting to let the compiler to automatically deduce and insert retain/release where possible to simplify the burdern of manual management.
We don't use ARC in the Metal HAL driver given that IREE has its own object refcount and lifetime management mechanism. Metal HAL GPU objects are tracked with that to be consistent with others. Each Metal HAL GPU object retains the underlying Metal id<MTL*> object on construction and releases on destruction.
Metal is one of the main modern GPU APIs that provide more explicit control over the hardware. The mapping between IREE HAL classes and Metal protocols are relatively straightforward:
| IREE HAL Class | Metal Protocol |
|---|---|
hal::Driver | N/A |
hal::Device | MTLDevice |
hal::CommandQueue | MTLCommandQueue |
hal::CommandBuffer | MTLCommandBuffer |
hal::Semaphore | MTLSharedEvent |
hal::Allocator | N/A |
hal::Buffer | MTLBuffer |
In the following subsections, we go over each pair to provide more details.
There is no native driver abstraction in Metal. IREE's Metal HAL driver still provides a hal::metal::MetalDriver subclass inheriting from common hal::Driver class. hal::metal::MetalDriver just retains all available Metal devices in the system during its lifetime to provide similar interface as other HAL drivers.
hal::metal::MetalDevice inherits hal::Device to provide the interface to Metal GPU device by wrapping a id<MTLDevice>. Upon construction, hal::metal::MetalDevice creates and retains one queue for both dispatch and transfer during its lifetime.
Metal requres command buffers to be created from a MTLCommandQueue. In IREE HAL, command buffers are directly created from the hal::Device. hal::metal::MetalDevice chooses the proper queue to create the command buffer under the hood.
IREE HAL command queue follows Vulkan for modelling submission. Specifically, hal::CommandQueue::Submit() takes a SubmissionBatch, which contains a list of waiting hal::Semaphores, a list of command buffers, and a list signaling hal::Semaphores. There is no direct mapping in Metal; so hal::metal::MetalCommandQueue performs the submission in three steps:
MTLCommandBuffer to encodeWaitForEvent:value for all waiting hal::Semaphores and commit this command buffer.SubmissionBatch.MTLCommandBuffer to encodeSignalEvent:value for all signaling hal::Semaphores and commit this command buffer.There is also no direct WaitIdle() for MTLCommandQueues. hal::metal::MetalCommandQueue implements WaitIdle() by committing an empty MTLCommandBuffer and registering a complete handler for it to signal a semaphore to wake the current thread, which is put into sleep by waiting on the semaphore.
In Metal, commands are recorded into a command buffer with three different kinds of command encoders: MTLRenderCommandEncoder, MTLComputeCommandEncoder, MTLBlitCommandEncoder, and MTLParallelRenderCommandEncoder. Each encoder has its own create/end call. There is no overall begin/end call for the whold command buffer. So even hal::metal::MetalCommandBuffer implements an overall Begin()/End() call, under the hood it may create a new command encoder for a specific API call.
hal::Semaphore allows host->device, device->host, host->host, and device->device synchronization. It maps to Vulkan timeline semaphore. In Metal world, the counterpart would be MTLSharedEvent. Most of the hal::Semaphore APIs are simple to implement in MetalSharedEvent, with Wait() as an exception. A listener is registered on the MTLSharedEvent with notifyListener:atValue:block: to singal a semaphore to wake the current thread, which is put into sleep by waiting on the semaphore.
At the moment the Metal HAL driver just has a very simple hal::Allocator implementation. It just wraps a MTLDevice and redirects all allocation requests to the MTLDevice. No page/pool/slab or whatever. This is only meant to get started. In the future we should have a better memory allocation library, probably by layering the Vulkan Memory Allocator on top of MTLHeap.
IREE hal::Buffer maps Metal MTLBuffer. See Memory Management for more details.
Metal provides four MTLStorageMode options:
MTLStorageModeShared: The resource is stored in system memory and is accessible to both the CPU and the GPU.MTLStorageModeManaged: The CPU and GPU may maintain separate copies of the resource, and any changes must be explicitly synchronized.MTLStorageModePrivate: The resource can be accessed only by the GPU.MTLStorageMemoryless: The resource’s contents can be accessed only by the GPU and only exist temporarily during a render pass.Among them, MTLStorageModeManaged is only available on macOS.
IREE HAL defines serveral MemoryType. They need to map to the above storage modes:
kDeviceLocal but not kHostVisible, MTLStorageModePrivate is chosen.kDeviceLocal and kHostVisible:MTLStorageModeManaged can be chosen.MTLStorageModeShared is chosen.DeviceLocal but kDeviceVisible, MTLStorageModeShared is chosen.kDeviceLocal and not kDeviceVisible, MTLStorageModeShared is chosen. (TODO: We should probably use host buffer here.)IREE HAL also allows to create buffers with kHostCoherent bit. This may still be backed by MTLStorageModeManaged MTLBuffers in macOS. To respect the kHostCoherent protocol, the Metal HAL driver will perform necessary InValidate/Flush operations automatically under the hood.