Re: [PATCH v4 17/39] unwind_user/sframe: Add support for reading .sframe headers

Josh Poimboeuf
2025-02-04T19:59:06Z

On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 01:21:21PM -0800, Indu Bhagat wrote:
> > Yeah, and it's actually bothering me quite a lot 🙂 I have a tentative
> > proposal, maybe we can discuss this for SFrame v3? Let me briefly
> > outline the idea.
> >
>
> I looked at the idea below. It could work wrt unaligned accesses.
>
> Speaking of unaligned accesses, I will ask away: Is the reason to avoid
> unaligned accesses performance hit or are there other practical reasons to
> it ?

I think performance is the main concern, though there are still some CPU
arches out there which don't support unaligned accesses.

> Combining the requirements from your email and Josh's follow up:
> - No unaligned accesses
> - Sorted FREs
>
> I would put compaction as a "good to have" requirement. It appears to me
> that any compaction will mean a sort of post-processing which will interfere
> with JIT usecase.

I think we should still consider the fast lookup table. We might want
to prototype something just to see what the speedup looks like. Similar
to compaction it could just be an optional feature implemented by the
linker which JIT doesn't have to use.

--
Josh