Horton

Re: Popcount optimization using AVX512

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

View thread
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Matthias van de Meent <boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com>, "Amonson, Paul D" <paul.d.amonson@intel.com>, "pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, "Shankaran, Akash" <akash.shankaran@intel.com>
Date: 2023-11-07T20:14:41Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. Fix __attribute__((target(...))) usage.

  2. Use __attribute__((target(...))) for AVX-512 support.

  3. Fix code for probing availability of AVX-512.

  4. Optimize visibilitymap_count() with AVX-512 instructions.

  5. Optimize pg_popcount() with AVX-512 instructions.

  6. Inline pg_popcount() for small buffers.

  7. Avoid function call overhead of pg_popcount() in syslogger.c.

  8. Refactor code for setting pg_popcount* function pointers.

  9. Inline pg_popcount{32,64} into pg_popcount().

  10. Remove MSVC scripts

  11. Use ARMv8 CRC instructions where available.

  12. Use Intel SSE 4.2 CRC instructions where available.

Attachments

On Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 09:53:15PM -0800, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 09:59:26PM -0600, Nathan Bossart wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 07:15:01PM -0800, Noah Misch wrote:
>> > The glibc/gcc "ifunc" mechanism was designed to solve this problem of choosing
>> > a function implementation based on the runtime CPU, without incurring function
>> > pointer overhead.  I would not attempt to use AVX512 on non-glibc systems, and
>> > I would use ifunc to select the desired popcount implementation on glibc:
>> > https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/Function-Attributes.html
>> 
>> Thanks, that seems promising for the function pointer cases.  I'll plan on
>> trying to convert one of the existing ones to use it.  BTW it looks like
>> LLVM has something similar [0].
>> 
>> IIUC this unfortunately wouldn't help for cases where we wanted to keep
>> stuff inlined, such as is_valid_ascii() and the functions in pg_lfind.h,
>> unless we applied it to the calling functions, but that doesn't ѕound
>> particularly maintainable.
> 
> Agreed, it doesn't solve inline cases.  If the gains are big enough, we should
> move toward packages containing N CPU-specialized copies of the postgres
> binary, with bin/postgres just exec'ing the right one.

I performed a quick test with ifunc on my x86 machine that ordinarily uses
the runtime checks for the CRC32C code, and I actually see a consistent
3.5% regression for pg_waldump -z on 100M 65-byte records.  I've attached
the patch used for testing.

The multiple-copies-of-the-postgres-binary idea seems interesting.  That's
probably not something that could be enabled by default, but perhaps we
could add support for a build option.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com