Re: A population of population counts

On 7 May 2016 at 12:41, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I noticed that we have three "number_of_ones" tables under contrib and
> two under src, and some new specially masked variants for visibility
> maps.
>
> Would it be an improvement if we just defined one table with external
> linkage, and accessed it via a macros/functions popcount_uint8, and
> wider versions _uint32, popcount_array(data, len) that sum the
> popcounts of their component bytes?
>
> Then there would be less duplication, and future opportunities to use
> fancy built-ins/assembler instructions/vectorisation in one central
> place, and to work in larger sizes than bytes.
>
> Perhaps we could also get rid of the new special masked popcount
> tables by masking the value we look up instead, eg walk through the
> page calling popcount_uint64(value & FROZEN_BITMASK_64).
>
> As for the rightmost_one_pos table in bitmapset.c, couldn't the
> various bms_XXX functions just use ffs(n) - 1 and work word-at-a-time?
> That generates a bsf instruction at -O2 on this machine.
>
> The micro-optimisation opportunities probably don't matter, but I
> wondered if it might at least be interesting to delete a bunch of
> code, and re-use a standard interface for something that apparently
> several modules need to do.

I remember looking at GCC's __builtin_popcount() about 6 months ago
with thoughts about using it for bms_num_members(). I did see
performance improvements from micro-benchmarks to compare it to the
number_of_ones[] array, and saw a small improvement. Likely the
improvements I did see with those would actually have been better in a
real world case, since not having a number_of_ones[] array in a CPU
cache might be more useful for a workload with a more contended cache.

I'd like to see us using those functions, when they're available and
falling back on the array when they're not. Sounds like that would
just be a new configure test. Perhaps a good home for some shared code
would be numutils.c. I see the functions there declared in builtins.h
which I see used in contrib/spi. I think it could all be made to work
quite nicely with types like bitmapword just with some preprocessor
trickery.

I'd say go for it. Sounds like a like these would be some nice
reusable functions that we already have a suitable home for.

--
David Rowley http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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