Re: [PATCH] [RFT] crypto: aes-generic - turn off -ftree-pre and -ftree-sra

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 10:46 PM, Jakub Jelinek <jakub@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 09:52:05PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> diff --git a/crypto/aes_generic.c b/crypto/aes_generic.c
>> index ca554d57d01e..35f973ba9878 100644
>> --- a/crypto/aes_generic.c
>> +++ b/crypto/aes_generic.c
>> @@ -1331,6 +1331,20 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(crypto_aes_set_key);
>>       f_rl(bo, bi, 3, k);     \
>>  } while (0)
>>
>> +#if __GNUC__ >= 7
>> +/*
>> + * Newer compilers try to optimize integer arithmetic more aggressively,
>> + * which generally improves code quality a lot, but in this specific case
>> + * ends up hurting more than it helps, in some configurations drastically
>> + * so. This turns off two optimization steps that have been shown to
>> + * lead to rather badly optimized code with gcc-7.
>> + *
>> + * See also https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=83356
>> + */
>> +#pragma GCC optimize("-fno-tree-pre")
>> +#pragma GCC optimize("-fno-tree-sra")
>
> So do it only when UBSAN is enabled?  GCC doesn't have a particular
> predefined macro for those (only for asan and tsan), but either the kernel
> does have something already, or could have something added in the
> corresponding Makefile.

My original interpretation of the resulting object code suggested that disabling
those two optimizations produced better results for this particular
file even without
UBSAN, on both gcc-7 and gcc-8 (but not gcc-6), so my patch might have
been better, but I did some measurements now as Ard suggested, showing
cycles/byte for AES256/CBC with 8KB blocks:


               default      ubsan         patched        patched+ubsan
gcc-4.3.6        14.9        ----           14.9         ----
gcc-4.6.4        15.0        ----           15.8         ----
gcc-4.9.4        15.5        20.7           15.9         20.9
gcc-5.5.0        15.6        47.3           86.4         48.8
gcc-6.3.1        14.6        49.4           94.3         50.9
gcc-7.1.1        13.5        54.6           15.2         52.0
gcc-7.2.1        16.8       124.7           92.0         52.2
gcc-8.0.0        15.0      no boot          15.3        no boot

I checked that there are actually three significant digits on the measurements,
detailed output is available at https://pastebin.com/eFsWYjQp

It seems that I was wrong about the interpretation that disabling
the optimization would be a win on gcc-7 and higher, it almost
always makes things worse even with UBSAN. Making that
check "#if __GNUC__ == 7 && IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_UBSAN_SANITIZE_ALL)"
would help here, or we could list the file as an exception for
UBSAN and never sanitize it.

Looking at the 'default' column, I wonder if anyone would be interested
in looking at why the throughput regressed with gcc-7.2 and gcc-8.

       Arnd