lib/sort: make swap functions more generic

Patch series "lib/sort & lib/list_sort: faster and smaller", v2.

Because CONFIG_RETPOLINE has made indirect calls much more expensive, I
thought I'd try to reduce the number made by the library sort functions.

The first three patches apply to lib/sort.c.

Patch #1 is a simple optimization.  The built-in swap has special cases
for aligned 4- and 8-byte objects.  But those are almost never used;
most calls to sort() work on larger structures, which fall back to the
byte-at-a-time loop.  This generalizes them to aligned *multiples* of 4
and 8 bytes.  (If nothing else, it saves an awful lot of energy by not
thrashing the store buffers as much.)

Patch #2 grabs a juicy piece of low-hanging fruit.  I agree that nice
simple solid heapsort is preferable to more complex algorithms (sorry,
Andrey), but it's possible to implement heapsort with far fewer
comparisons (50% asymptotically, 25-40% reduction for realistic sizes)
than the way it's been done up to now.  And with some care, the code
ends up smaller, as well.  This is the "big win" patch.

Patch #3 adds the same sort of indirect call bypass that has been added
to the net code of late.  The great majority of the callers use the
builtin swap functions, so replace the indirect call to sort_func with a
(highly preditable) series of if() statements.  Rather surprisingly,
this decreased code size, as the swap functions were inlined and their
prologue & epilogue code eliminated.

lib/list_sort.c is a bit trickier, as merge sort is already close to
optimal, and we don't want to introduce triumphs of theory over
practicality like the Ford-Johnson merge-insertion sort.

Patch #4, without changing the algorithm, chops 32% off the code size
and removes the part[MAX_LIST_LENGTH+1] pointer array (and the
corresponding upper limit on efficiently sortable input size).

Patch #5 improves the algorithm.  The previous code is already optimal
for power-of-two (or slightly smaller) size inputs, but when the input
size is just over a power of 2, there's a very unbalanced final merge.

There are, in the literature, several algorithms which solve this, but
they all depend on the "breadth-first" merge order which was replaced by
commit 835cc0c8477f with a more cache-friendly "depth-first" order.
Some hard thinking came up with a depth-first algorithm which defers
merges as little as possible while avoiding bad merges.  This saves
0.2*n compares, averaged over all sizes.

The code size increase is minimal (64 bytes on x86-64, reducing the net
savings to 26%), but the comments expanded significantly to document the
clever algorithm.

TESTING NOTES: I have some ugly user-space benchmarking code which I
used for testing before moving this code into the kernel.  Shout if you
want a copy.

I'm running this code right now, with CONFIG_TEST_SORT and
CONFIG_TEST_LIST_SORT, but I confess I haven't rebooted since the last
round of minor edits to quell checkpatch.  I figure there will be at
least one round of comments and final testing.

This patch (of 5):

Rather than having special-case swap functions for 4- and 8-byte
objects, special-case aligned multiples of 4 or 8 bytes.  This speeds up
most users of sort() by avoiding fallback to the byte copy loop.

Despite what ca96ab859ab4 ("lib/sort: Add 64 bit swap function") claims,
very few users of sort() sort pointers (or pointer-sized objects); most
sort structures containing at least two words.  (E.g.
drivers/acpi/fan.c:acpi_fan_get_fps() sorts an array of 40-byte struct
acpi_fan_fps.)

The functions also got renamed to reflect the fact that they support
multiple words.  In the great tradition of bikeshedding, the names were
by far the most contentious issue during review of this patch series.

x86-64 code size 872 -> 886 bytes (+14)

With feedback from Andy Shevchenko, Rasmus Villemoes and Geert
Uytterhoeven.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/f24f932df3a7fa1973c1084154f1cea596bcf341.1552704200.git.lkml@sdf.org
Signed-off-by: George Spelvin <lkml@sdf.org>
Acked-by: Andrey Abramov <st5pub@yandex.ru>
Acked-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Reviewed-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Daniel Wagner <daniel.wagner@siemens.com>
Cc: Don Mullis <don.mullis@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions