Re: [PATCH 2/2] lib/string.c: Optimize memchr()

From: Joe Perches
Date: Sun Jul 10 2022 - 11:16:31 EST


On Sun, 2022-07-10 at 22:28 +0800, Yu-Jen Chang wrote:
> The original version of memchr() is implemented with the byte-wise
> comparing technique, which does not fully use 64-bits or 32-bits
> registers in CPU. We use word-wide comparing so that 8 characters
> can be compared at the same time on CPU. This code is base on
> David Laight's implementation.
>
> We create two files to measure the performance. The first file
> contains on average 10 characters ahead the target character.
> The second file contains at least 1000 characters ahead the
> target character. Our implementation of “memchr()” is slightly
> better in the first test and nearly 4x faster than the orginal
> implementation in the second test.

It seems you did not test this with 32bit compilers as
there are 64 bit constants without ull

> diff --git a/lib/string.c b/lib/string.c
[]
> @@ -905,21 +905,35 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(strnstr);
> #ifndef __HAVE_ARCH_MEMCHR
> /**
> * memchr - Find a character in an area of memory.
> - * @s: The memory area
> + * @p: The memory area
> * @c: The byte to search for
> - * @n: The size of the area.
> + * @length: The size of the area.
> *
> * returns the address of the first occurrence of @c, or %NULL
> * if @c is not found
> */
> -void *memchr(const void *s, int c, size_t n)
> +void *memchr(const void *p, int c, unsigned long length)
> {
> - const unsigned char *p = s;
> - while (n-- != 0) {
> - if ((unsigned char)c == *p++) {
> - return (void *)(p - 1);
> + u64 mask, val;
> + const void *end = p + length;
> +
> + c &= 0xff;
> + if (p <= end - 8) {
> + mask = c;
> + MEMCHR_MASK_GEN(mask);
> +
> + for (; p <= end - 8; p += 8) {
> + val = *(u64 *)p ^ mask;
> + if ((val + 0xfefefefefefefeffu) &
> + (~val & 0x8080808080808080u))

here.