Re: [PATCH RFC v4 net-next 00/26] BPF syscall, maps, verifier, samples, llvm

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 1:52 AM, David Laight [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Of Alexei Starovoitov

quoted

one more RFC...

Major difference vs previous set is a new 'load 64-bit immediate' eBPF insn.
Which is first 16-byte instruction. It shows how eBPF ISA can be extended
while maintaining backward compatibility, but mainly it cleans up eBPF
program access to maps and improves run-time performance.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to follow the scheme used by a lot of cpus
and add a 'load high' instruction (follow with 'add' or 'or').

that was what I used before in pred_tree_walker->ebpf patch
(4 existing instructions (2 movs, shift, or) to load 'pred' pointer)
It's slower in interpreter than single instruction.

It still takes 16 bytes to load a 64bit immediate value, but the instruction
size remains constant.

size of instruction is not important. 99% of instructions are 8 byte long
and one is 16 byte. Big deal. It doesn't affect interpreter performance,
easy for verifier and was straightforward to do in LLVM as well.

There is nothing to stop any JIT software detecting the instruction pair.

well, it's actually very complicated to detect a sequence of
instructions that compute single 64-bit value.
Patch #11 detects and patches pseudo BPF_LD_IMM64 in
a single 'for' loop (see replace_map_fd_with_map_ptr), because
it's _single_ instruction. Any sequence of insns would require
building control and data flow graphs for verifier and JIT.
If you remember I resisted initially when Chema proposed
'load 64-bit immediate' equivalent, since back then the use cases
didn't require it. With maps done via FDs, the need has arisen.