Due to hysterical raisins, most RISC-V Linux distributions target a
RV64GC baseline excluding the Bit-manipulation ISA extensions, most
notably:
- Zba: address generation extension and
- Zbb: basic bit manipulation extension.
Most CPUs that would make sense to run FFmpeg on support Zba and Zbb
(including the current FATE runner), so it makes sense to optimise for
them. In fact a large chunk of existing assembler optimisations relies
on Zba and/or Zbb.
Since we cannot patch shared library code, the next best thing is to
carry a flag initialised at load-time and check it on need basis.
This results in 3 instructions overhead on isolated use, e.g.:
1: AUIPC rd, %pcrel_hi(ff_rv_zbb_supported)
LBU rd, %pcrel_lo(1b)(rd)
BEQZ rd, non_Zbb_fallback_code
// Zbb code here
The C compiler will typically load the flag ahead of time to reducing
latency, and can also keep it around if Zbb is used multiple times in a
single optimisation scope. For this to work, the flag symbol must be
hidden; otherwise the optimisation degrades with a GOT look-up to
support interposition:
1: AUIPC rd, GOT_OFFSET_HI
LD rd, GOT_OFFSET_LO(rd)
LBU rd, (rd)
BEQZ rd, non_Zbb_fallback_code
// Zbb code here
This patch adds code to provision the flag in libraries using bit
manipulation functions from libavutil: byte-swap, bit-weight and
counting leading or trailing zeroes.
Rémi Denis-Courmont