Re: [PATCH v2] x86-64: Optimize bzero

[Noah Goldstein <goldstein.w.n@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 7:01 AM Adhemerval Zanella via Libc-alpha
<libc-alpha@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/02/2022 18:07, Patrick McGehearty via Libc-alpha wrote:
> > Just as another point of information, Solaris libc implemented
> > bzero as moving arguments around appropriately then jumping to
> > memset. Noone noticed enough to file a complaint. Of course,
> > short fixed-length bzero was handled with in line stores of zero
> > by the compiler. For long vector bzeroing, the overhead was
> > negligible.
> >
> > When certain Sparc hardware implementations provided faster methods
> > for zeroing a cache line at a time on cache line boundaries,
> > memset added a single test for zero ifandonlyif the length of code
> > to memset was over a threshold that seemed likely to make it
> > worthwhile to use the faster method. The principal advantage
> > of the fast zeroing operation is that it did not require data
> > to move from memory to cache before writing zeros to memory,
> > protecting cache locality in the face of large block zeroing.
> > I was responsible for much of that optimization effort.
> > Whether that optimization was really worth it is open for debate
> > for a variety of reasons that I won't go into just now.
>
> Afaik this is pretty much what optimized memset implementations
> does, if architecture allows it. For instance, aarch64 uses
> 'dc zva' for sizes larger than 256 and powerpc uses dcbz with a
> similar strategy.
>
> >
> > Apps still used bzero or memset(target,zero,length) according to
> > their preferences, but the code was unified under memset.
> >
> > I am inclined to agree with keeping bzero in the API for
> > compatibility with old code/old binaries/old programmers. :-)
>
> The main driver to remove the bzero internal implementation is just
> the *currently* gcc just do not generate bzero calls as default
> (I couldn't find a single binary that calls bzero in my system).

Does it make sense then to add '__memsetzero' so that we can have
a function optimized for setting zero?

>
> So to actually see any performance advantage from the optimized
> bzero, we will need to reevaluate the gcc optimization to transform
> it on memset (which will need to be applied per-architecture base)
> which I seem highly unlikely gcc maintainer will accept it.
>
> Some time ago LLVM tried to do something similar to bcmp, but in the
> end it was not a good idea to use an already define symbol and it
> ended up with __memcmp_eq instead.
>
> >
> > Using shared memset code for the implementation of bzero
> > is worthwhile for reducing future maintenance costs.
> >
> > - Patrick McGehearty
> > former Sparc/Solaris performance tuning person
> >
> >
> >
> > On 2/10/2022 2:42 PM, Adhemerval Zanella via Libc-alpha wrote:
> >>
> >> On 10/02/2022 17:27, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> >>>> We are discussing different subjects here: what I want is to remove the
> >>>> glibc *internal* optimization for bzero, which is essentially an
> >>>> implementation detail.  In a first glance it would change performance,
> >>>> however gcc does a hard job replacing bzero/bcmp/bcopy with their
> >>>> str* counterparts, so it highly unlike that newer binaries will actually
> >>>> call bzero.
> >>> Okay, then yes, go ahead and remove bzero(3) from glibc if GCC will
> >>> continue supporting it.  Just remember that some users keep writing and
> >>> wanting to write bzero(3) instead of memset(3) in their .c files, so
> >>> it's far from being dead in source code.
> >> Again, I am not proposing to *remove* bzero, but rather the internal
> >> optimizations that currently only adds code complexity and maintenance
> >> burden.  My patchset [1] will keep the ABI as-is, the difference is
> >> bcopy and bzero will use the default implementation on all architectures.
> >>
> >> [1] https://patchwork.sourceware.org/project/glibc/list/?series=7243
> >