Re: [RFC PATCH 0/6] Improve the performance of RISC-V vector unit-stride ld/st instructions

[Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>]

On 2/15/24 09:28, Max Chou wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> When glibc with RVV support [1], the memcpy benchmark will run 2x to 60x
> slower than the scalar equivalent on QEMU and it hurts developer
> productivity.
> 
>  From the performance analysis result, we can observe that the glibc
> memcpy spends most of the time in the vector unit-stride load/store
> helper functions.
> 
> Samples: 465K of event 'cycles:u', Event count (approx.): 1707645730664
>    Children      Self  Command       Shared Object            Symbol
> +   28.46%    27.85%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] vext_ldst_us
> +   26.92%     0.00%  qemu-riscv64  [unknown]                [.] 0x00000000000000ff
> +   14.41%    14.41%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] qemu_plugin_vcpu_mem_cb
> +   13.85%    13.85%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] lde_b
> +   13.64%    13.64%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] cpu_stb_mmu
> +    9.25%     9.19%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] cpu_ldb_mmu
> +    7.81%     7.81%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] cpu_mmu_lookup
> +    7.70%     7.70%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] ste_b
> +    5.53%     0.00%  qemu-riscv64  qemu-riscv64             [.] adjust_addr (inlined)
> 
> 
> So this patchset tries to improve the performance of the RVV version of
> glibc memcpy on QEMU by improving the corresponding helper function
> quality.
> 
> The overall performance improvement can achieve following numbers
> (depending on the size).
> Average: 2.86X / Smallest: 1.15X / Largest: 4.49X
> 
> PS: This RFC patchset only focuses on the vle8.v & vse8.v instructions,
> the next version or next serious will complete other vector ld/st part.

You are still not tackling the root problem, which is over-use of the full out-of-line 
load/store routines.  The reason that cpu_mmu_lookup is in that list is because you are 
performing the full virtual address resolution for each and every byte.

The only way to make a real improvement is to perform virtual address resolution *once* 
for the entire vector.  I refer to my previous advice:

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2137#note_1757501369


r~