On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 01:45:29AM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote: > On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 06:57:52PM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote: > > First, I wanted to mention that decoding of variable-length fields has been > > extensively studied for decompression algorithms, e.g. for Huffman decoding. > > And it turns out that it can be done branchlessly. The basic idea is that you > > have a branchless refill step that looks like the following: > > > > #define REFILL_BITS_BRANCHLESS() \ > > bitbuf |= get_unaligned_u64(p) << bitsleft; \ > > p += 7 - ((bitsleft >> 3) & 0x7); \ > > bitsleft |= 56; > > > > That branchlessly ensures that 'bitbuf' contains '56 <= bitsleft <= 63' bits. > > Then, the needed number of bits can be removed and returned: > > > > #define READ_BITS(n) \ > > REFILL_BITS_BRANCHLESS(); \ > > tmp = bitbuf & (((u64)1 << (n)) - 1); \ > > bitbuf >>= (n); \ > > bitsleft -= (n); \ > > tmp > > > > If you're interested, I can give you some references about the above method. > > I might be interested in those references, new bit tricks and integer > encodings are always fun :) There are some good blog posts by Fabian Giese: * https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/reading-bits-in-far-too-many-ways-part-1/ * https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/reading-bits-in-far-too-many-ways-part-2/ * https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/reading-bits-in-far-too-many-ways-part-3/ And the examples I gave above are basically what I use in libdeflate: https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate/blob/master/lib/deflate_decompress.c > > But, I really just wanted to mention it for completeness, since I think you'd > > actually want to go in a slightly different direction, since (a) you have all > > the field widths available from the beginning, as opposed to being interleaved > > into the bitstream itself (as is the case in Huffman decoding for example), so > > you're not limited to serialized decoding of each field, (b) your fields are up > > to 96 bits, and (c) you've selected a bitstream convention that seems to make it > > such that your stream *must* be read in aligned units of u64, so I don't think > > something like REFILL_BITS_BRANCHLESS() could work for you anyway. > > > > What I would suggest instead is preprocessing the list of 6 field lengths to > > create some information that can be used to extract all 6 fields branchlessly > > with no dependencies between different fields. (And you clearly *can* add a > > preprocessing step, as you already have one -- the dynamic code generator.) > > > > So, something like the following: > > > > const struct field_info *info = &format->fields[0]; > > > > field0 = (in->u64s[info->word_idx] >> info->shift1) & info->mask; > > field0 |= in->u64s[info->word_idx - 1] >> info->shift2; > > > > ... but with the code for all 6 fields interleaved. > > > > On modern CPUs, I think that would be faster than your current C code. > > > > You could do better by creating variants that are specialized for specific > > common sets of parameters. During "preprocessing", you would select a variant > > and set an enum accordingly. During decoding, you would switch on that enum and > > call the appropriate variant. (This could also be done with a function pointer, > > of course, but indirect calls are slow these days...) > > testing random btree updates: > > dynamically generated unpack: > rand_insert: 20.0 MiB with 1 threads in 33 sec, 1609 nsec per iter, 607 KiB per sec > > old C unpack: > rand_insert: 20.0 MiB with 1 threads in 35 sec, 1672 nsec per iter, 584 KiB per sec > > the Eric Biggers special: > rand_insert: 20.0 MiB with 1 threads in 35 sec, 1676 nsec per iter, 583 KiB per sec > > Tested two versions of your approach, one without a shift value, one > where we use a shift value to try to avoid unaligned access - second was > perhaps 1% faster > > so it's not looking good. This benchmark doesn't even hit on > unpack_key() quite as much as I thought, so the difference is > significant. > > diff --git a/fs/bcachefs/bkey.c b/fs/bcachefs/bkey.c I don't know what this patch applies to, so I can't properly review it. I suggest checking the assembly and making sure it is what is expected. In general, for this type of thing it's also helpful to put together a userspace micro-benchmark program so that it's very fast to evaluate different options. Building and booting a kernel and doing some I/O benchmark on a bcachefs sounds much more time consuming and less precise. > -struct bkey __bch2_bkey_unpack_key(const struct bkey_format_processed *format_p, > +struct bkey __bch2_bkey_unpack_key(const struct bkey_format_processed *format, > const struct bkey_packed *in) > { > - const struct bkey_format *format = &format_p->f; > - struct unpack_state state = unpack_state_init(format, in); > struct bkey out; > > - EBUG_ON(format->nr_fields != BKEY_NR_FIELDS); > - EBUG_ON(in->u64s < format->key_u64s); > + EBUG_ON(format->f.nr_fields != BKEY_NR_FIELDS); > + EBUG_ON(in->u64s < format->f.key_u64s); > EBUG_ON(in->format != KEY_FORMAT_LOCAL_BTREE); > - EBUG_ON(in->u64s - format->key_u64s + BKEY_U64s > U8_MAX); > + EBUG_ON(in->u64s - format->f.key_u64s + BKEY_U64s > U8_MAX); > > - out.u64s = BKEY_U64s + in->u64s - format->key_u64s; > + out.u64s = BKEY_U64s + in->u64s - format->f.key_u64s; > out.format = KEY_FORMAT_CURRENT; > out.needs_whiteout = in->needs_whiteout; > out.type = in->type; > out.pad[0] = 0; > > + if (likely(format->aligned)) { > +#define x(id, field) out.field = get_aligned_field(format, in, id); > + bkey_fields() > +#undef x > + } else { > + struct unpack_state state = unpack_state_init(&format->f, in); > + > #define x(id, field) out.field = get_inc_field(&state, id); > - bkey_fields() > + bkey_fields() > #undef x > + } It looks like you didn't change the !aligned case. How often is the 'aligned' case taken? I think it would also help if the generated assembly had the handling of the fields interleaved. To achieve that, it might be necessary to interleave the C code. - Eric