The image collector runs after every completed guest submission as well as at each flip, and
every run advanced the age it compares against. A title submits dozens of command buffers per
frame, so "unused for 16 ticks" meant a fraction of a frame: every texture sampled once a frame
was deleted and recreated, and Superliminal uploaded 3,591 textures (2.2 GB) every 5 seconds.
Deleting a GPU-written image the cache cannot read back also dropped its contents.
Only a flip now advances the age. Collection after a submission still runs, so memory pressure is
relieved during long stretches without a flip. Superliminal's per-frame uploads went from ~55 to
none, and its intro scene from 12 to 45 fps.
Only forward, nested branches were emitted as structured control flow; every program with a
loop, and every single-block program, went through the loop around a switch on the guest PC,
which keeps all registers live and stops the host compiler from optimizing across blocks.
A block that a later block branches back to - on a wave-uniform condition or with s_branch -
now opens a SPIR-V loop whose body is structured like any range, whose continue evaluates
that branch's condition, and whose iterations share the dispatcher's step guard so a guest
loop that never ends still cannot wedge the GPU queue. A conditional branch from the body to
the block after the latch is a break out of the innermost loop. Any other backward edge, or a
break past an outer loop, keeps the dispatcher as before.
Across eight games, programs left on the dispatcher went from 760 to 104 (Poppy, Silent Hill,
Oregon Trail and Dreaming Sarah to none); every emitted module passes spirv-val and the
frames match. Octopath's 12.5M-invocation instanced draw went from 12.2 to 10.8 ms.
Every mapping change queued behind the GPU worker so it could not race a pending GPU read.
During loading that worker is busy translating shaders, and Demon's Souls' reservations and
batch maps waited seconds for a queue slot (23.6 s over 132 calls, up to 7.1 s each) while
the change itself took about a millisecond.
A change that only places memory where the GPU was never given anything - a kernel-chosen
address, or a fixed range that is empty or reserved and overlaps no registered span - cannot
race a GPU read and has nothing to unregister, so it now runs on the calling thread. Those
paths also skip the unregister request for free and reserved ranges, which are never
registered; waiting on the worker while holding the mapping lock that GPU reads take would
deadlock, so reaching a registered span there throws instead.
The guest context-transfer stub that fiber switches go through keeps the
Windows TEB stack bounds in sync by storing the target stack top and
bottom to gs:[8] and gs:[16]. Unlike the guest-entry and exception stubs,
it did so on every host. On macOS gs addresses the pthread TSD, where
those slots hold errno's address and another key: a fiber switch wrote
its stack bounds over them, and the next failed libc call on the thread
(a timed-out condition wait) crashed reading errno through the pointer.
Demon's Souls died this way within 10-50 s of boot; a hardware
watchpoint on the thread's errno slot stopped in this stub.
The fiber bounds sync now lives next to the other TEB-bound helpers and,
like them, emits nothing off Windows.
The red-zone patcher computes a shifted core for every span: the run of
faultable guest memory accesses that executes with RSP moved below the
red zone. A span over register-only instructions has no such access, so
the core could not be computed and the span was refused as too short.
SHA rewrite sites are exactly that shape (sha256msg1/msg2/rnds2 on
registers), so no SHA instruction was rewritten any more: on hosts
without the SHA extensions every one trapped and was emulated one at a
time. Poppy Playtime logged sha_rewrites=0 with 144 too-short refusals,
hit hundreds of thousands of illegal-instruction traps and stopped making
progress within a minute.
A span with no guest memory access has nothing that must run outside the
shift, and the span builder has already refused any instruction that
touches RSP, so the whole span is the core.
Every runtime module load sets up the import stubs of all loaded modules
again, and each setup built a fresh trampoline and rewrote the stub's 16 bytes
-- under guest threads that may be executing exactly those bytes.
A trampoline only encodes its import index, so the trampolines are now cached
by index and reused, and a stub that already jumps to the trampoline it would
be given is left untouched, with no unprotect/write/restore cycle at all. A
reload of a module whose stubs are already patched therefore writes no guest
code.
The trampoline ABI test builds its backend with GetUninitializedObject, which
skips field initializers, so it has to supply the new cache; both fields now
go through one helper that names a field it cannot find.
The export returns the context memory size through one size_t. For heap
output it also wrote a second qword (an alignment) after it, and titles keep
other locals there: Octopath Traveler II's allocator reads the dword at +12 of
that block as a divisor, so it faulted with #DE during boot. Write only the
size, wherever the output lives.
A draw with no color target, no depth target and no pixel stage was treated as
having no observable effect and dropped. That is wrong when the vertex or
emulated geometry stage stores to a buffer or a storage image: a GPU-culling or
stream-out pass whose only output is the buffer a later indirect draw reads
looks exactly like that, and dropping it leaves the indirect draw reading
stale data.
Such a draw now runs for its stores alone. The check only resolves the shader
programs when there is an export address to resolve, so a genuinely empty draw
still costs nothing.
sceImeKeyboardGetInfo zeroed 0x88 bytes at its out pointer and returned
success. SceImeKeyboardInfo is 0x24 bytes -- six 4-byte members plus
int8_t reserved[12] -- so the call scribbled 0x64 bytes past the caller's
struct, and a title that reads the device type or the status got a zero for
both, which is not a state the library ever reports.
The export now writes exactly sizeof(SceImeKeyboardInfo) and reports an OSK
device in the DISCONNECTED state, which is what the host can honestly claim
since no physical keyboard is bridged. sceImeKeyboardGetResourceId returned
success without touching the caller's array, leaving the storage that
sceImeKeyboardGetInfo is called with uninitialized; it now publishes the
caller's user id with an empty id array. Both use the real error values.
Also adds a test for the existing scePadResetOrientation, which is a
handle-only call with no out parameter, so a bad handle is its only failure.
The three waveform-parse entry points returned NOT_FOUND, and Void Terrarium
calls ParseWaveformData on its audio thread for every sound it loads.
They now parse the container and publish the description SceNgs2WaveformInfo
lays out (0xE8 bytes, with the block table at 0x48). A RIFF/WAVE fmt chunk
resolves to PCM by bit depth, to IEEE float, through the SubFormat GUID for
WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE, or to ATRAC9, whose configuration is decoded so that
the audio unit size, samples per unit, units per frame and delay samples
describe the real frame and superframe. A smpl chunk supplies the loop points
and a fact chunk the decoded sample count. The "VAGp" container maps onto the
VAG waveform type at 28 samples per 16-byte HE-VAG unit.
ParseWaveformFile resolves the guest path and reads the header at the given
offset. ParseWaveformUser would have to drive a guest read callback, so it
reports INVALID_WAVEFORM_DATA rather than fabricating a description.
Unreal binds a whole volume as a render target with the last slice set to
its depth, one past the end, and the resolver stopped the session on it.
The color block writes only the slices the volume has, so the view is now
clamped to them. A view that starts past the last slice is still fatal.
Out-parameter handling in libSceAudioOut2 was inferred at runtime: a helper
picked whichever of two argument registers looked like a writable pointer, and
another decided from the host address range whether a pointer was a guest
stack slot. Neither is a signal. The ABI names exactly one out pointer per
argument slot, and guest stacks sit at 0x7FFF_xxxx_xxxx on Windows but
0x6FFF_xxxx_xxxx on macOS, so the heuristic silently changed behaviour per
host. Every export now reads its out pointer from the register the prototype
gives it: ContextQueryMemory from rsi, PortCreate from rdx, PortGetState from
rsi, GetSpeakerInfo and GetSystemState from rdi.
The written sizes are now the real sizeof() of each struct.
SceAudioOut2PortState is 0x40 bytes, not 0x20. SceAudioOut2SpeakerInfo is
0x50, not 0x20, and its contents were invented; it now reports a TV speaker
type with front-left and front-right and the two stereo speaker angles.
sceAudioOut2SpeakerArrayCreate follows its real signature (pHandle,
pVbapParams, pAmbiParams): the handle goes to rdi, the speaker count and the
caller's buffer and size come out of the param block, and the handle is that
buffer when the title supplied one. The previous reading wrote the handle over
the VBAP parameters' speaker-position pointer and left the caller's handle
uninitialized. sceAudioOut2GetSpeakerArrayCoefficients writes
uiNumCoefficients floats to rsi and the ambisonics form writes them to rdx;
both used to zero a fixed 0x400-byte slab, and the ambisonics form could pick
its own count register as the destination address.
Errors are returned in the libSceAudioOut2 error space (0x80268xxx) rather
than as generic codes a title never compares against, and
sceAudioOut2UserGetSupportedAttributes is added.
sceAudioOut2ContextQueryMemory and sceAudioOut2ContextGetQueueLevel are left
exactly as they are, so that the two changes already in flight for them do not
collide with this one; the two address-range predicates survive for those two
callers alone.
sceAgcCreateInterpolantMapping and its version 2 run once per draw. Each one
read every semantic word with its own guest read — the output semantic table
was re-read from the start for every pixel input — and then wrote the 32
SPI_PS_INPUT_CNTL (register, value) pairs as 64 separate four-byte guest
writes, each paying the full guest write path.
Both semantic tables are now read once, the register block is built on the
stack (the identity pairs first, then the computed values over them), and the
whole block goes out in a single guest write. The output table is rented from
the pool when it is larger than a kilobyte. The bit arithmetic is unchanged,
and a new test pins version 1's output to the values the per-word
implementation produced.
Measured on Dreaming Sarah in-game: 8.6 us to 1.7 us per call, which is 5.0 s
down to 1.0 s of the main thread over about two minutes.
A host shader compiler can spend tens of seconds on a single large translated
compute program, and the command stream could not advance while it did, because
the pipeline cache holds its lock across the creation call. Every other queue
that wanted any pipeline waited behind it too.
The pipeline host can now report that a compute pipeline is not ready yet. The
Vulkan presenter answers that way the first time it sees a program: it prepares
everything the command stream owns (descriptor set layout, pipeline layout,
shader module) up front and runs only vkCreateComputePipelines on a worker
thread, so the task touches nothing else. The number of compiles in flight is
bounded, since each one blocks its thread inside the host compiler and a frame
can touch many programs at once. Asking again returns the finished pipeline
without starting a second compile.
The dispatch waits for its pipeline rather than being dropped: a guest that
does not replay a one-shot dispatch deadlocks, because the dispatch can feed a
label a later packet waits on. Asking again from the executor keeps that wait
outside the pipeline cache's lock. Hosts that compile cheaply keep the blocking
behaviour through the interface default, and
SHARPEMU_ASYNC_COMPUTE_PIPELINES=0 compiles inline.
A suspend point inserts GPU commands that drain the graphics pipe. The call
that inserts it does not wait for those commands, and the hardware allows one
suspend point to be in flight, but the queue implemented it by blocking the
calling thread until every accepted submission had been processed.
The frame boundary is now a queued submission of its own, ordered behind the
graphics work it ends, and processing it flushes what the frame recorded. The
caller returns immediately for the first boundary and only waits when a second
one arrives while the first is still pending. Shutdown still drains, because no
slice will run a queued boundary once the queue stops accepting work, and a
cancelled queue drops pending boundaries along with the rest.
Measured on Octopath Traveler II: the call went from 223 ms to 72 ms, and the
guest render thread spent 38 s instead of 107 s of its 170 s inside it.
PredicationZPassWaitOp is 0 for kWaitForQueryResults and 1 for
kDoNotPredicateIfQueryResultsNotReady, so the wait bit was being read
inverted. Every SET_PREDICATION packet that asked the command processor not to
stall drained the whole host queue instead, and the packets that did ask to
wait read the predication label without waiting for the results at all, so
they could act on a stale value.
The drain now happens only for kWaitForQueryResults, and only on the branch
that actually reads the label. A packet tagged
kDoNotPredicateIfQueryResultsNotReady leaves its work unpredicated, which is
what the hardware does while the results are still outstanding, and clearing
predication reads no memory at all so it never drains.
A resource descriptor the host materializes is built by replaying the shader's
scalar operations on the host. The validator that decides whether a value can
be replayed listed only part of what the scalar evaluator implements, so a
descriptor computed through any of the others was rejected even though the
host can compute it exactly.
The list now covers every pure scalar function the evaluator supports: the
remaining integer maximum, absolute value and high multiplies, the signed and
unsigned comparisons, 64-bit equality, the bit-counting and bit-scanning
operations, the quad mask, the integer/float conversions, and the float
arithmetic and comparisons. Anything with side effects or a lane-varying
result is still rejected.
S_CODE_END pads the space after a shader's last instruction. When the code
after the final S_ENDPGM ends in a backward branch, the linear decoder walks
straight into that padding and failed with an unknown SOPP opcode 0x1F, which
stopped the session.
The decoder now names 0x1F and ends the program there, unless a forward branch
still targets code beyond it -- in which case the padding really would be
inside the program and the decode still fails.
Two things were wrong in the SOPK forms, in both the SPIR-V and the MSL
backend.
S_CMPK_*_U32 compares against SIMM16 zero-extended; only the signed compares
sign-extend it. Both translators sign-extended it for every compare, so
"s_cmpk_le_u32 s4, 0xffff" was true for any value at all. NGG geometry
programs use exactly that test on the packed vertex and primitive count, so
they took their no-primitive path and exported a single null primitive, which
left Unreal's volume passes empty. The register S_CMPK names is also only
read, yet user-data liveness recorded it as a definition, so a compare on a
user-data register left that register unloaded; it now counts as a use, as
does the register of the SOPK accumulations.
S_ADDK_I32 is defined as D.i = D.i + signext(SIMM16) with SCC set on signed
overflow, the same SCC rule as S_ADD_I32, which both backends already
implement. Neither wrote SCC for the SOPK form, so a following
S_CBRANCH_SCC0/1 or S_CSELECT read whatever the previous instruction had left
there. S_MOVK_I32 and S_MULK_I32 correctly leave SCC alone.
v_min_f32 and v_max_f32 return the other operand when one of them is NaN, and
v_cvt_u32_f32 and v_cvt_i32_f32 saturate an out-of-range value to the target
type's limit and turn NaN into zero. The GLSL FMin and FMax instructions and
SPIR-V's ConvertFToU and ConvertFToS all leave those cases undefined, so a
host driver is free to hand back the NaN or an arbitrary integer, and Metal's
fast math does return the NaN.
The minimum and maximum now select the other operand when either side is NaN,
and the two conversions clamp at the type's limits and return zero for NaN.
NaN is tested on the value's bits rather than with an ordered comparison, so
fast math cannot assume the test away.
Device tests cover this and the wave-wide maximum that Unreal's motion blur
computes with DPP row_shr, v_permlanex16_b32 and v_readlane_b32 across a
64-lane wave.
The two remaining reserved pixel system inputs were also left reading zero.
SAMPLE_COVERAGE now reads the first element of the SampleMask built-in, and
POS_FIXED_PT packs the integer pixel position taken from FragCoord, x in bits
[15:0] and y in bits [31:16], so no enabled pixel system input is left unset.
A pixel shader that enables FRONT_FACE or ANCILLARY reads those VGPRs, but the
translator only reserved their compact slots and left them reading zero.
Unreal Engine bakes its colour grading LUT one volume slice per instance and
has the pixel shader read the slice back out of ANCILLARY[28:16], the render
target array index. With that register zero every slice was baked from the
blue = 0 slice, so the tonemapped image lost its blue channel.
ANCILLARY is now the Layer built-in placed at bit 16, and FRONT_FACE the
FrontFacing built-in mapped to 1.0f for a front face and 0 for a back face,
which satisfies both the float greater-than and the integer not-equal tests
compilers emit for it.
Guest memcpy went through the managed gateway on every call: two write
tracking notifications, the memory reader lock and two region lookups, about
0.8 us per call under Rosetta even for a copy of a few bytes. Dreaming Sarah
makes roughly 45k of those calls a second.
Guest memory is identity-mapped, and every fault a copy can take -- write
tracking, lazy commit -- is resolved from the fault address alone, so the copy
can run as a forward rep movsb in a fast-path stub. A destination that sits
inside the source, where a forward copy would read bytes it has already
written, and the write-watch diagnostic both keep the managed export.
The managed import gateway costs a guest-to-host stack switch, a full guest
register pack, a GCHandle dereference and the whole dispatch bookkeeping
before the HLE export even runs. For the two hottest trivial imports that is
three orders of magnitude more work than the answer itself: one UE5 title's
load measured 12.9M scePthreadGetspecific calls (38 s of wall time) and 4.3M
scePthreadSelf calls, at roughly 2.9 us each.
The few values those two imports need are now published into a per-host-thread
native block whose address lives in a native TLS slot, rebound whenever a
thread enters or is restored as a guest thread, and the two imports are
patched to emitted x86-64 stubs that read the block directly. pthread-specific
values live in native per-thread tables so a stub and the managed export read
exactly the same storage and cannot drift apart. The managed path stays the
source of truth for every case a stub declines -- no block published, no guest
thread bound, no value table, a key outside the table -- which it reaches by
jumping to the import's normal trampoline with every register intact,
including the incoming RAX variadic vector count.
The value-table slot follows whichever handle the current thread reports, the
bound guest thread or the host thread's own synthetic handle, so
pthread_getspecific is answered on unbound host threads as well; the primary
execution thread never enters through the guest-thread path and is a major
caller in UE5 titles. The self-handle slot stays guest-only, because
pthread_self on an unbound thread registers that thread's CPU context with the
guest scheduler and must keep reaching the managed export. Each stub also
bumps a per-thread hit counter, reported next to the existing HLE cost
histogram, so a call that misses the stub is visible rather than invisible.
The stubs are gated to macOS x64, where the emitted TLS read matches the
platform's pthread key array, and switched off whenever import or pthread
tracing needs every call to pass through the gateway.
The translator materializes a good deal of translation-time knowledge as
SPIR-V instructions: a specialized descriptor's buffer format, swizzles,
strides, and the conditions that guard host-guaranteed ranges all end up as
arithmetic, comparisons and selections over operands the builder itself just
emitted as constants. That reaches the driver as runtime work, and on Metal
every one of those instructions costs pipeline-creation time.
The module builder now remembers the value of each 32-bit integer and boolean
constant it emits and folds pure instructions over them while it builds:
integer arithmetic, bit operations, shifts, bitfield extraction, the integer
and logical comparisons, the logical connectives, and a selection on a known
condition. Folding happens at emission, so a folded result feeds further
folding without a separate pass. Anything whose operands are not all known
constants is emitted exactly as before.
The buffer format decoder uses this directly: a specialized descriptor makes
the unified format a constant, so it decodes on the host instead of emitting
a module-level lookup table and an indexed read.
The test that covered that path asserted the table's presence and now asserts
its absence.
sceAudioOut2ContextAdvance and sceAudioOut2ContextPush each submitted the
context's pending PCM and, whenever nothing reached a host device, each slept
a whole grain in the software pacing fallback. A title that calls Advance then
Push once per grain therefore spent two grain periods per grain, so its audio
thread ran at half real time and held up every thread waiting on it.
Advance now claims the next grain on the context's clock and returns without
blocking (or, when its own submit already blocked in the backend, marks the
grain served), and Push waits for the grain Advance claimed; a Push with no
preceding Advance claims one itself. Neither call skips pending PCM. Because
the output holds QueueDepth grains, a grain may be queued as soon as the grain
QueueDepth-1 ahead of it starts playing, so a context can run that far ahead
of real time before a push blocks.
sceAudioOut2ContextGetQueueLevel reported an empty queue with the full depth
available on every call. Titles size their rendering by those two values --
Wwise renders exactly puiAvailableQueues grains per update and pushes them
non-blocking -- so a queue that never filled made it render a full queue every
update and then block inside Push for a grain per push while holding its audio
lock, which starved the game thread. The level now comes from the context's
grain clock, or, once a grain has reached a host device, from that device's
queued milliseconds beyond a short cushion.
In wave32 a lane mask is its low register alone: EXEC_HI and VCC_HI are
ordinary SGPRs. Writing one of them therefore must not recompute the wave
lane state, and the lane state has to be tested against the low dword rather
than against a 64-bit mask composed from the low and high registers.
The lane-bit test that guards this covered the wave64 constant width only, so
it now accepts a mask of either width.
The guard that refuses push descriptors on MoltenVK keyed on the
VK_KHR_portability_subset device extension, but that extension is not
enumerated for every device: the headless device the draw replay and the
device tests create took the raw driver limit, so replays on macOS read
guest storage buffers past their first bytes as zero (MoltenVK reports a
zero OpArrayLength for buffers bound through push descriptors).
The limit now comes from one policy both the presenter and the headless
device use, and macOS, whose only driver is MoltenVK, pushes none
regardless of which extensions are listed.
Reporting a loaded source as active before Start regressed Quake, which
waits for its player to go inactive before starting its queued intro
videos. A player left loaded but unstarted stays active forever. Only a
title that registers an event callback can see the ready state and call
sceAvPlayerStart itself, so a player whose title asks for autoStart or
registers no callback now plays by itself once its source is ready,
reaches the end of the stream and reports inactive. Titles that start
playback themselves keep seeing a loaded source as active.
A program with any V_MOVREL* instruction declared its whole VGPR file as a
512-entry private array indexed at run time, which Metal spills to thread
memory, so every register access became a memory access. Keep one variable
per register and resolve relative accesses with a select over the registers
the program names. Octopath's instanced vertex shader (1536 x 8124): 112 ms ->
6.4 ms per draw in replay, output byte-identical.
kuba