netdev - Re: [PATCH v5 net-next] net: Implement fast csum_partial for x86

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Date:	Mon, 7 Mar 2016 16:49:05 -0800
From:	Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>
To:	Tom Herbert <tom@...bertland.com>
Cc:	David Laight <David.Laight@...lab.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"davem@...emloft.net" <davem@...emloft.net>,
	"netdev@...r.kernel.org" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	"tglx@...utronix.de" <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	"mingo@...hat.com" <mingo@...hat.com>,
	"hpa@...or.com" <hpa@...or.com>, "x86@...nel.org" <x86@...nel.org>,
	"kernel-team@...com" <kernel-team@...com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 net-next] net: Implement fast csum_partial for x86_64

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 4:07 PM, Tom Herbert <tom@...bertland.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 3:52 PM, Alexander Duyck
> <alexander.duyck@...il.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 9:33 AM, Tom Herbert <tom@...bertland.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 5:56 AM, David Laight <David.Laight@...lab.com> wrote:
>>>> From: Alexander Duyck
>>>>  ...
>>>>> Actually probably the easiest way to go on x86 is to just replace the
>>>>> use of len with (len >> 6) and use decl or incl instead of addl or
>>>>> subl, and lea instead of addq for the buff address.  None of those
>>>>> instructions effect the carry flag as this is how such loops were
>>>>> intended to be implemented.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've been doing a bit of testing and that seems to work without
>>>>> needing the adcq until after you exit the loop, but doesn't give that
>>>>> much of a gain in speed for dropping the instruction from the
>>>>> hot-path.  I suspect we are probably memory bottle-necked already in
>>>>> the loop so dropping an instruction or two doesn't gain you much.
>>>>
>>>> Right, any superscalar architecture gives you some instructions
>>>> 'for free' if they can execute at the same time as those on the
>>>> critical path (in this case the memory reads and the adc).
>>>> This is why loop unrolling can be pointless.
>>>>
>>>> So the loop:
>>>> 10:     addc %rax,(%rdx,%rcx,8)
>>>>         inc %rcx
>>>>         jnz 10b
>>>> could easily be as fast as anything that doesn't use the 'new'
>>>> instructions that use the overflow flag.
>>>> That loop might be measurable faster for aligned buffers.
>>>
>>> Tested by replacing the unrolled loop in my patch with just:
>>>
>>> if (len >= 8) {
>>>                 asm("clc\n\t"
>>>                     "0: adcq (%[src],%%rcx,8),%[res]\n\t"
>>>                     "decl %%ecx\n\t"
>>>                     "jge 0b\n\t"
>>>                     "adcq $0, %[res]\n\t"
>>>                             : [res] "=r" (result)
>>>                             : [src] "r" (buff), "[res]" (result), "c"
>>> ((len >> 3) - 1));
>>> }
>>>
>>> This seems to be significantly slower:
>>>
>>> 1400 bytes: 797 nsecs vs. 202 nsecs
>>> 40 bytes: 6.5 nsecs vs. 26.8 nsecs
>>
>> You still need the loop unrolling as the decl and jge have some
>> overhead.  You can't just get rid of it with a single call in a tight
>> loop but it should improve things.  The gain from what I have seen
>> ends up being minimal though.  I haven't really noticed all that much
>> in my tests anyway.
>>
>> I have been doing some testing and the penalty for an unaligned
>> checksum can get pretty big if the data-set is big enough.  I was
>> messing around and tried doing a checksum over 32K minus some offset
>> and was seeing a penalty of about 200 cycles per 64K frame.
>>
> Out of how many cycles to checksum 64K though?

So the clock cycles I am seeing is ~16660 for unaligned vs 16416
aligned.  So yeah the effect is only a 1.5% penalty for the total
time.

>> One thought I had is that we may want to look into making an inline
>> function that we can call for compile-time defined lengths less than
>> 64.  Maybe call it something like __csum_partial and we could then use
>> that in place of csum_partial for all those headers that are a fixed
>> length that we pull such as UDP, VXLAN, Ethernet, and the rest.  Then
>> we might be able to look at taking care of alignment for csum_partial
>> which will improve the skb_checksum() case without impacting the
>> header pulling cases as much since that code would be inlined
>> elsewhere.
>>
> As I said previously, if alignment really is a factor then we can
> check up front if a buffer crosses a page boundary and call the slow
> path function (original code). I'm seeing a 1 nsec hit to add this
> check.

Well I was just noticing there are a number of places we can get an
even bigger benefit if we just bypass the need for csum_partial
entirely.  For example the DSA code is calling csum_partial to extract
2 bytes.  Same thing for protocols such as VXLAN and the like.  If we
could catch cases like these with a __builtin_constant_p check then we
might be able to save some significant CPU time by avoiding the
function call entirely and just doing some inline addition on the
input values directly.

- Alex