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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst | 30 |
1 files changed, 25 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst b/Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst index cb402c59eca5..12a246fcf6cb 100644 --- a/Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst +++ b/Documentation/bpf/bpf_design_QA.rst @@ -172,11 +172,31 @@ registers which makes BPF inefficient virtual machine for 32-bit CPU architectures and 32-bit HW accelerators. Can true 32-bit registers be added to BPF in the future? -A: NO. The first thing to improve performance on 32-bit archs is to teach -LLVM to generate code that uses 32-bit subregisters. Then second step -is to teach verifier to mark operations where zero-ing upper bits -is unnecessary. Then JITs can take advantage of those markings and -drastically reduce size of generated code and improve performance. +A: NO. + +But some optimizations on zero-ing the upper 32 bits for BPF registers are +available, and can be leveraged to improve the performance of JITed BPF +programs for 32-bit architectures. + +Starting with version 7, LLVM is able to generate instructions that operate +on 32-bit subregisters, provided the option -mattr=+alu32 is passed for +compiling a program. Furthermore, the verifier can now mark the +instructions for which zero-ing the upper bits of the destination register +is required, and insert an explicit zero-extension (zext) instruction +(a mov32 variant). This means that for architectures without zext hardware +support, the JIT back-ends do not need to clear the upper bits for +subregisters written by alu32 instructions or narrow loads. Instead, the +back-ends simply need to support code generation for that mov32 variant, +and to overwrite bpf_jit_needs_zext() to make it return "true" (in order to +enable zext insertion in the verifier). + +Note that it is possible for a JIT back-end to have partial hardware +support for zext. In that case, if verifier zext insertion is enabled, +it could lead to the insertion of unnecessary zext instructions. Such +instructions could be removed by creating a simple peephole inside the JIT +back-end: if one instruction has hardware support for zext and if the next +instruction is an explicit zext, then the latter can be skipped when doing +the code generation. Q: Does BPF have a stable ABI? ------------------------------ |