• Ma Ling's avatar
    x86, mem: Optimize memcpy by avoiding memory false dependece · 59daa706
    Ma Ling authored
    All read operations after allocation stage can run speculatively,
    all write operation will run in program order, and if addresses are
    different read may run before older write operation, otherwise wait
    until write commit. However CPU don't check each address bit,
    so read could fail to recognize different address even they
    are in different page.For example if rsi is 0xf004, rdi is 0xe008,
    in following operation there will generate big performance latency.
    1. movq (%rsi),	%rax
    2. movq %rax,	(%rdi)
    3. movq 8(%rsi), %rax
    4. movq %rax,	8(%rdi)
    
    If %rsi and rdi were in really the same meory page, there are TRUE
    read-after-write dependence because instruction 2 write 0x008 and
    instruction 3 read 0x00c, the two address are overlap partially.
    Actually there are in different page and no any issues,
    but without checking each address bit CPU could think they are
    in the same page, and instruction 3 have to wait for instruction 2
    to write data into cache from write buffer, then load data from cache,
    the cost time read spent is equal to mfence instruction. We may avoid it by
    tuning operation sequence as follow.
    
    1. movq 8(%rsi), %rax
    2. movq %rax,	8(%rdi)
    3. movq (%rsi),	%rax
    4. movq %rax,	(%rdi)
    
    Instruction 3 read 0x004, instruction 2 write address 0x010, no any
    dependence.  At last on Core2 we gain 1.83x speedup compared with
    original instruction sequence.  In this patch we first handle small
    size(less 20bytes), then jump to different copy mode. Based on our
    micro-benchmark small bytes from 1 to 127 bytes, we got up to 2X
    improvement, and up to 1.5X improvement for 1024 bytes on Corei7.  (We
    use our micro-benchmark, and will do further test according to your
    requirment)
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMa Ling <ling.ma@intel.com>
    LKML-Reference: <1277753065-18610-1-git-send-email-ling.ma@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
    59daa706
memcpy_32.c 988 Bytes