phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Supporting AVX2/SSE2 or not with a single binary

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Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 12:04:54 +0000
From: Darren J Moffat <Darren.Moffat@...cle.COM>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Supporting AVX2/SSE2 or not with a single binary

On 03/20/14 00:54, Bill Cox wrote:
> One reason I think we see applications running without SSE/AVX2
> support is that operating systems don't want to support two versions
> of a binary, and they have to support older machines.  The Blake2 code
> I've read does not provide for a single binary that supports both - I
> have to link either to the blake2-ref code or the blake2-sse code.  My
> TwoCats code has inherited this limitation, since I used the Blake2
> code as a roadmap for figuring out how SSE2 works.  These guys over on
> StackOverflow think they've got code to detect SIMD support and allow
> a single binary to support both:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6121792/how-to-check-if-a-cpu-supports-the-sse3-instruction-set
>
> How cool is StackOverflow?  So, is this the right way to build
> high-speed crypto binaries now days?

This is something we have to deal with for the crypto libraries in 
Solaris.  We need a single set of binaries that run on systems with 
various different CPU capabilities.

The linker/loader on Solaris has the ability to build a single ELF 
binary with multiple implementations of the same functions based on the 
CPU capabilities (we call them HWCAP) and the runtime loader 
automatically selects the correct one based on which CPU you are running 
on.  For testing and debug purposes you can tweak the list of CPU 
features that the runtime loader selects on via the LD_HWCAP environment 
variable.

The assembler also automatically tags the output files with an 
indication of which CPU features (instruction sets) it used.

I don't know if this functionality is available on other systems though.

For example our crypto library is tagged as:
	ELF 64-bit LSB dynamic lib AMD64 Version 1 [SSE2 SSE CMOV]
which is what file(1) shows. If instead I use elfdump and ask it to show 
me the capabilties sections I get this:

Capabilities Section:  .SUNW_cap

  Object Capabilities:
   index  tag           value
     [0]  CA_SUNW_HW_1  0x1820     [ SSE2 SSE CMOV ]

  Symbol Capabilities:
   index  tag           value
     [2]  CA_SUNW_ID    0x1629     i86pc-aesni
     [3]  CA_SUNW_HW_1  0x4001820  [ AES SSE2 SSE CMOV ]

  Symbol Capabilities:
   index  tag           value
     [5]  CA_SUNW_ID    0x1b7e     i86pc-clmul
     [6]  CA_SUNW_HW_1  0x8001820  [ PCLMULQDQ SSE2 SSE CMOV ]

   Symbols:

So You can see we have multiple different implementations of aes based 
on which instructions are available and the runtime loader does the 
selection for us.

-- 
Darren J Moffat