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Date: Sat, 16 May 2015 09:33:20 -0700
From: Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@...il.com>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Eliminating preference for avoiding thread pointer? Cost
on MIPS?
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 11:55:44PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> Traditionally, musl has gone to pretty great lengths to avoid
> depending on the thread pointer. The original reason was that it was
> not always initialized, and when it was, the init was lazy. This
> resulted in a lot of cruft, where we would have lots of constructs of
> the form:
>
> bar = some_predicate ? __pthread_self()->foo : global_foo
>
> or similar. Being that these predicates depend(ed) on globals, they
> were/are rather expensive in position-independent code on most archs.
> Now that the thread pointer is always initialized at startup (since
> 1.1.0) and assumed to have succeeded (since 1.1.9; musl now performs
> HCF if it fails), this seems to be an unnecessary cost. Not only does
> it cost cycles; it also has a complexity cost in terms of code to
> maintain the state of the predicates (e.g. the atomics for locale
> state) and in terms of libc-internal assumptions. So I'd like to just
> use the thread pointer directly wherever it makes sense, and take
> advantage of the fact that we have it.
>
> Unfortunately, there's one arch where thread-pointer access may be
> prohibitively costly: old MIPS. On the MIPS o32 ABI, the thread
> pointer is accessed via the "rdhwr $3,$29" instruction, which was only
> introduced in MIPS32rev2. MIPS-I, MIPS-II, and possibly the original
> MIPS32 lack it, and while Linux has a "fast path" trap to emulate it,
> I'm not clear on how "fast" it is.
>
> First, I'd like to find out how slow this trap is. If it's something
> like 150 cycles, that's ugly but probably acceptable. If it's more
> like 1000 cycles, that's a big problem. If anyone can run the attached
> test program on real MIPS-I or MIPS-II hardware and give me the
> results, please do! Compile it once with -O3 -DDO_RDHWR and once with
> just -O3 and send the (one-line) output of both to the list. It
> doesn't matter what libc your MIPS system is using -- any should be
> fine, but you might need to link with -lrt on glibc or uclibc.
dd-wrt micro on a WRT54Gv8.0:
\u@\h:\w\$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.37 (root@...wrt) (gcc version 3.4.6 (OpenWrt-2.0)) #13303 Thu Aug 12 04:47:54 CEST 2010
\u@\h:\w\$ wget http://192.168.2.114:8080/def-bin
Connecting to 192.168.2.114:8080 (192.168.2.114:8080)
\u@\h:\w\$ echo *
def-bin
\u@\h:\w\$ chmod +x def-bin
\u@\h:\w\$ ./def-bin
0 0.016751000
\u@\h:\w\$ wget http://192.168.2.114:8080/rd-bin
Connecting to 192.168.2.114:8080 (192.168.2.114:8080)
\u@\h:\w\$ chmod +x rd-bin
\u@\h:\w\$ ./rd-bin
Illegal instruction
def-bin is withou -DDO_RDHWR, rd-bin is with.
Both compiled static with musl 1.1.6 (because that's the latest musl-cross
toolchain) and stripped.
free reports 448 kb of 5736 kb free. (In other words, there's a reason it's
that stripped down.)
Thanks,
Isaac Dunham
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