Re: x86 memcpy performance

From: Denys Vlasenko
Date: Sun Aug 14 2011 - 07:14:15 EST


On Sunday 14 August 2011 11:59, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> Here's the SSE memcpy version I got so far, I haven't wired in the
> proper CPU feature detection yet because we want to run more benchmarks
> like netperf and stuff to see whether we see any positive results there.
>
> The SYSTEM_RUNNING check is to take care of early boot situations where
> we can't handle FPU exceptions but we use memcpy. There's an aligned and
> misaligned variant which should handle any buffers and sizes although
> I've set the SSE memcpy threshold at 512 Bytes buffersize the least to
> cover context save/restore somewhat.
>
> Comments are much appreciated! :-)
>
> --- a/arch/x86/include/asm/string_64.h
> +++ b/arch/x86/include/asm/string_64.h
> @@ -28,10 +28,20 @@ static __always_inline void *__inline_memcpy(void *to, const void *from, size_t
>
> #define __HAVE_ARCH_MEMCPY 1
> #ifndef CONFIG_KMEMCHECK
> +extern void *__memcpy(void *to, const void *from, size_t len);
> +extern void *__sse_memcpy(void *to, const void *from, size_t len);
> #if (__GNUC__ == 4 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 3) || __GNUC__ > 4
> -extern void *memcpy(void *to, const void *from, size_t len);
> +#define memcpy(dst, src, len) \
> +({ \
> + size_t __len = (len); \
> + void *__ret; \
> + if (__len >= 512) \
> + __ret = __sse_memcpy((dst), (src), __len); \
> + else \
> + __ret = __memcpy((dst), (src), __len); \
> + __ret; \
> +})

Please, no. Do not inline every memcpy invocation.
This is pure bloat (comsidering how many memcpy calls there are)
and it doesn't even win anything in speed, since there will be
a fucntion call either way.
Put the __len >= 512 check inside your memcpy instead.

You may do the check if you know that __len is constant:
if (__builtin_constant_p(__len) && __len >= 512) ...
because in this case gcc will evaluate it at compile-time.

--
vda
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