Re: [PATCH] lib/crypto: blake2b: Roll up BLAKE2b round loop on 32-bit

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Wed, 3 Dec 2025 at 20:09, Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> BLAKE2b has a state of 16 64-bit words.  Add the message data in and
> there are 32 64-bit words.  With the current code where all the rounds
> are unrolled to enable constant-folding of the blake2b_sigma values,
> this results in a very large code size on 32-bit kernels, including a
> recurring issue where gcc uses a large amount of stack.
>
> There's just not much benefit to this unrolling when the code is already
> so large.  Let's roll up the rounds when !CONFIG_64BIT.  Then, remove
> the now-unnecessary override of the stack frame size warning.
>
> Code size improvements for blake2b_compress_generic():
>
>                   Size before (bytes)    Size after (bytes)
>                   -------------------    ------------------
>     i386, gcc           27584                 3632
>     i386, clang         18208                 3248
>     arm32, gcc          19912                 2860
>     arm32, clang        21336                 3344
>
> Running the BLAKE2b benchmark on a !CONFIG_64BIT kernel on an x86_64
> processor shows a 16384B throughput change of 351 => 340 MB/s (gcc) or
> 442 MB/s => 375 MB/s (clang).  So clearly not much of a slowdown either.
> But also that microbenchmark also effectively disregards cache usage,
> which is important in practice and is far better in the smaller code.
>
> Note: If we rolled up the loop on x86_64 too, the change would be
> 7024 bytes => 1584 bytes and 1960 MB/s => 1396 MB/s (gcc), or
> 6848 bytes => 1696 bytes and 1920 MB/s => 1263 MB/s (clang).
> Maybe still worth it, though not quite as clearly beneficial.
>
> Fixes: 91d689337fe8 ("crypto: blake2b - add blake2b generic implementation")
> Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  lib/crypto/Makefile  |  1 -
>  lib/crypto/blake2b.c | 25 +++++++++++++------------
>  2 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
>

Reviewed-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@xxxxxxxxxx>