I noticed ksm spending quite a lot of time in memcmp on a large
KVM box. The current memcmp loop is very unoptimised - byte at a
time compares with no loop unrolling. We can do much much better.
Optimise the loop in a few ways:
- Unroll the byte at a time loop
- For large (at least 32 byte) comparisons that are also 8 byte
aligned, use an unrolled modulo scheduled loop using 8 byte
loads. This is similar to our glibc memcmp.
A simple microbenchmark testing 10000000 iterations of an 8192 byte
memcmp was used to measure the performance:
baseline: 29.93 s
modified: 1.70 s
Just over 17x faster.
v2: Incorporated some suggestions from Segher:
- Use andi. instead of rdlicl.
- Convert bdnzt eq, to bdnz. It's just duplicating the earlier compare
and was a relic from a previous version.
- Don't use cr5, we have plans to use that CR field for fast local
atomics.
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Anton Blanchard