Re: [PATCH v2] x86-64: use 32-bit XOR to zero registers

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Wed Jul 04 2018 - 16:29:41 EST


On Mon 2018-07-02 04:31:54, Jan Beulich wrote:
> Some Intel CPUs don't recognize 64-bit XORs as zeroing idioms. Zeroing
> idioms don't require execution bandwidth, as they're being taken care
> of in the frontend (through register renaming). Use 32-bit XORs instead.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>

> @@ -702,7 +702,7 @@ _no_extra_mask_1_\@:
>
> # GHASH computation for the last <16 Byte block
> GHASH_MUL \AAD_HASH, %xmm13, %xmm0, %xmm10, %xmm11, %xmm5, %xmm6
> - xor %rax,%rax
> + xor %eax, %eax
>
> mov %rax, PBlockLen(%arg2)
> jmp _dec_done_\@

This is rather subtle... and looks like a bug. To zero 64-bit
register, you zero its lower half, relying on implicit zeroing of the
upper half. Wow.

Perhaps we should get comments in the code? Because the explicit code
is more readable...

Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature