Re: refactor architecture-specific popcount code

John Naylor <johncnaylorls@gmail.com>

From: John Naylor <johncnaylorls@gmail.com>
To: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2026-01-30T08:22:45Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 12:06 AM Nathan Bossart
<nathandbossart@gmail.com> wrote:
> [v5]

0001 - I'm pretty sure this is comparable to HEAD if the optimized
function is pg_popcount_sse42(). Has the AVX512 version been tested
with 8-byte inputs? That seems to have a lot of pre- and
post-processing involved. The inline wrapper only bypasses for 7 or
less bytes.

0002
- I tried running this on x86-64 with alignment sanitizer and no
alarms went off during "make check", but adding
pg_attribute_no_sanitize_alignment() would prevent surprises in the
future.
- I imagine that the old SIZEOF_VOID_P check is superfluous now, since
the whole file is gated by HAVE_X86_64_POPCNTQ.
- Maybe we can remove the aligned 32-bit path in
pg_popcount_(masked_)portable(), since that's on-topic for this patch
and would simplify things further.

--
John Naylor
Amazon Web Services



Commits

  1. Make use of pg_popcount() in more places.

  2. Remove uses of popcount builtins.

  3. Remove some unnecessary optimizations in popcount code.

  4. Remove specialized word-length popcount implementations.

  5. Move x86-64-specific popcount code to pg_popcount_x86.c.

  6. Refactor some SIMD and popcount macros.

  7. Rename "fast" and "slow" popcount functions.

  8. Rename pg_popcount_avx512.c to pg_popcount_x86.c.

  9. Remove trailing zero words from Bitmapsets

  10. Don't use _BitScanForward64/_BitScanReverse64 on 32-bit MSVC builds