[RFC PATCH] eventdev: ensure 16-byte alignment for events

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2023 14:15:00 +0200
Mattias Rönnblom <hofors at lysator.liu.se> wrote:

> On 2023-10-05 13:51, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > The event structure in DPDK is 16-bytes in size, and events are
> > regularly passed as parameters directly rather than being passed as
> > pointers.  
> 
> When are events passed by-value, rather than by-reference? There are no 
> such examples in the public eventdev API.
> 
> To help compiler optimize correctly, we can explicitly request
> > 16-byte alignment for events, which means that we should be able
> > to do aligned vector loads/stores (e.g. with SSE or Neon) when working
> > with those events.
> >   
> 
> That change is both helping and sabotaging the optimizer's work. Now 
> every stack allocation needs to be 2-byte aligned - in DPDK code, and in 
> the application.
> 
> The effect this change has on an eventdev app using DSW is a ~3 
> cycle/event performance degradation on an AMD Zen 3 system, and a ~4 
> cycle/event performance degradation on a Skylake-generation Intel CPU.
> 
> What scenarios do you have in mind, where this change would improve the 
> generated code? Something where there are no unaligned loads available 
> in the ISA, or they are much slower than their aligned counterparts?
> 
> When I looked into the same issue for the DPDK IP checksumming routines, 
> there basically were no such. Not that I could find.
> 
> > Signed-off-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson at intel.com>

Don't understand what the issue is. Isn't the event structure typically
on stack. Adding padding there would not help.