Re: [PATCH v4 05/11] arm64: csum: Disable KASAN for do_csum()

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Fri Apr 24 2020 - 07:01:04 EST


On 2020-04-24 10:41 am, David Laight wrote:
From: Robin Murphy
Sent: 22 April 2020 12:02
..
Sure - I have a nagging feeling that it could still do better WRT
pipelining the loads anyway, so I'm happy to come back and reconsider
the local codegen later. It certainly doesn't deserve to stand in the
way of cross-arch rework.

How fast does that loop actually run?

I've not characterised it in detail, but faster than any of the other attempts so far ;)

To my mind it seems to do a lot of operations on each 64bit value.
I'd have thought that a loop based on:
sum64 = *ptr;
sum64_high = *ptr++ >> 32;
and then fixing up the result would be faster.

The x86-64 code is also bad!
On intel cpu prior to haswell a simple:
sum_64 += *ptr32++;
is faster than the current code.
(Although you can do a lot better even on ivy bridge.)

The aim here is to minimise load bandwidth - most Arm cores can slurp 16 bytes from L1 in a single load as quickly as any smaller amount, so nibbling away in little 32-bit chunks would result in up to 4x more load cycles. Yes, the C code looks ridiculous, but the other trick is that most of those operations don't actually exist. Since a __uint128_t is really backed by any two 64-bit GPRs - or if you're careful, one 64-bit GPR and the carry flag - all those shifts and rotations are in fact resolved by register allocation, so what we end up with is a very neat loop of essentially just loads and 64-bit accumulation:

...
138: a94030c3 ldp x3, x12, [x6]
13c: a9412cc8 ldp x8, x11, [x6, #16]
140: a94228c4 ldp x4, x10, [x6, #32]
144: a94324c7 ldp x7, x9, [x6, #48]
148: ab03018d adds x13, x12, x3
14c: 510100a5 sub w5, w5, #0x40
150: 9a0c0063 adc x3, x3, x12
154: ab08016c adds x12, x11, x8
158: 9a0b0108 adc x8, x8, x11
15c: ab04014b adds x11, x10, x4
160: 9a0a0084 adc x4, x4, x10
164: ab07012a adds x10, x9, x7
168: 9a0900e7 adc x7, x7, x9
16c: ab080069 adds x9, x3, x8
170: 9a080063 adc x3, x3, x8
174: ab070088 adds x8, x4, x7
178: 9a070084 adc x4, x4, x7
17c: 910100c6 add x6, x6, #0x40
180: ab040067 adds x7, x3, x4
184: 9a040063 adc x3, x3, x4
188: ab010064 adds x4, x3, x1
18c: 9a030023 adc x3, x1, x3
190: 710100bf cmp w5, #0x40
194: aa0303e1 mov x1, x3
198: 54fffd0c b.gt 138 <do_csum+0xd8>
...

Instruction-wise, that's about as good as it can get short of maintaining multiple accumulators and moving the pairwise folding out of the loop. The main thing that I think is still left on the table is that the load-to-use distances are pretty short and there's clearly scope to spread out and amortise the load cycles better, which stands to benefit both big and little cores.

Robin.