Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] siphash: add cryptographically secure hashtable function

Jason A. Donenfeld
2016-12-15T20:44:15Z

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Hannes Frederic Sowa
<hannes@stressinduktion.org> wrote:
> ARM64 and x86-64 have memory operations that are not vector operations
> that operate on 128 bit memory.

Fair enough. imull I guess.

> How do you know that the compiler for some architecture will not chose a
> more optimized instruction to load a 64 bit memory value into two 32 bit
> registers if you tell the compiler it is 8 byte aligned but it actually
> isn't? I don't know the answer but telling the compiler some data is 8
> byte aligned while it isn't really pretty much seems like a call for
> trouble.

If a compiler is in the business of using special 64-bit instructions
on 64-bit aligned data, then it is also the job of the compiler to
align structs to 64-bits when passed __aligned(8), which is what we've
done in this code. If the compiler were to hypothetically choose to
ignore that and internally convert it to a __aligned(4), then it would
only be able to do so with the knowledge that it will never use 64-bit
aligned data instructions. But so far as I can tell, gcc always
respects __aligned(8), which is why I use it in this patchset.

I think there might have been confusion here, because perhaps someone
was hoping that since in6_addr is 128-bits, that the __aligned
attribute would not be required and that the struct would just
automatically be aligned to at least 8 bytes. But in fact, as I
mentioned, in6_addr is actually composed of u32[4] and not u64[2], so
it will only be aligned to 4 bytes, making the __aligned(8) necessary.

I think for the purposes of this patchset, this is a solved problem.
There's the unaligned version of the function if you don't know about
the data, and there's the aligned version if you're using
__aligned(SIPHASH_ALIGNMENT) on your data. Plain and simple.

Jason