A set of examples for accelerating CRC32 calculations using the vector polynomial multiply sum (vpmsum) instructions introduced in POWER8. These instructions implement byte, halfword, word and doubleword carryless multiply/add.

An implementation of slice-by-8, one of the fastest lookup table methods is included so we can compare performance against it. Testing 5000000 iterations of a CRC of 32 kB of data (to keep it L1 cache contained):

# time slice_by_8_bench 32768 5000000
122.220 seconds

# time crc32_bench 32768 5000000
2.937 seconds

The vpmsum accelerated CRC is just over 41x faster.

This test was run on a 4.1 GHz POWER8, so the algorithm sustains about 52 GiB/sec or 13.6 bytes/cycle. The theoretical limit is 16 bytes/cycle since we can execute a maximum of one vpmsum instruction per cycle.

In another test, a version was added to the kernel and btrfs write performance was shown to be 3.8x faster. The test was done to a ramdisk to mitigate any I/O induced variability.

There's two different versions of crc32. They are, basically, the same algorithm. The only difference is that one is implemented in pure assembly (crc32.S) and the other in C using gcc (power8) vector intrinsics and builtins (vec_crc32.c) to make the compiler generate the asm instructions instead.

• Modify CRC and OPTIONS in the Makefile. There are examples for the two most common crc32s.

• Type make to create the constants (crc32_constants.h)

If you will use the pure asm version

• Import the code into your application (crc32.S crc32_wrapper.c crc32_constants.h ppc-opcode.h)

If you will use the C version

• Import the code into your application (vec_crc32.c crc32_constants.h)

• Call the CRC:

unsigned int crc32_vpmsum(unsigned int crc, unsigned char *p, unsigned long len);

Occasionally you may have a number of CRC32 polynomial implementations.

To do this you'll need to compile the C or assembler implementation with a different constants header file and change the function names to avoid linker conflicts.

To facilitate this optional defines can be introduced:

• CRC32_CONSTANTS_HEADER to be set to the quoted header filename.

• CRC32_FUNCTION to be set to the crc32 function name (instead of crc32_vpmsum)

• CRC32_FUNCTION_ASM (asm version only) to be set to the assember function name used by crc32_wrapper.c (defaults to __crc32_vpmsum).

An example of this is with crc32_two_implementations as found in the Makefile.

For a good background on CRCs, check out:

http://www.ross.net/crc/download/crc_v3.txt

A few key points:

• A CRC is the remainder after dividing a message by the CRC polynomial, ie M mod CRC_POLY
• multiply/divide is carryless
• add/subtract is an xor
• n (where n is the order of the CRC) bits of zeroes are appended to the end of the message.

One more important piece of information - a CRC is a linear function, so:

	CRC(A xor B) = CRC(A) xor CRC(B)

	CRC(A . B) = CRC(A) . CRC(B)	(remember this is carryless multiply)

If we take 64bits of data, represented by two 32 bit chunks (AAAAAAAA and BBBBBBBB):

CRC(AAAAAAAABBBBBBBB)
	= CRC(AAAAAAAA00000000 xor BBBBBBBB)
	= CRC(AAAAAAAA00000000) xor CRC(BBBBBBBB)

If we operate on AAAAAAAA:

CRC(AAAAAAAA00000000)
	= CRC(AAAAAAAA . 100000000)
	= CRC(AAAAAAAA) . CRC(100000000)

And CRC(100000000) is a constant which we can pre-calculate:

CRC(100000000)
	= 100000000 mod CRC_POLY
	= 2^32 mod CRC_POLY

Finally we can add our modified AAAAAAAA to BBBBBBBB:

CRC(AAAAAAAABBBBBBBB)
	= ((2^32 mod CRC_POLY) . CRC(AAAAAAAA)) xor CRC(BBBBBBBB)

In other words, with the right constants pre-calculated we can shift the input data around and we can also calculate the CRC in as many parallel chunks as we want.

No matter how much shifting we do, the final result will be be 64 bits of data (63 actually, because there is no carry into the top bit). To reduce it further we need a another trick, and that is Barrett reduction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_reduction

Barrett reduction is a method of calculating a mod n. The idea is to calculate q, the multiple of our polynomial that we need to subtract. By doing the computation 2x bits higher (ie 64 bits) and shifting the result back down 2x bits, we round down to the nearest multiple.

	k = 32
	m = floor((4^k)/n) = floor((4^32))/n)
	n = 64 bits of data
	a = 32 bit CRC

	q = floor(ma/(2^64))
	result = a - qn

An example in the floating point domain makes it clearer how this works:

a mod n = a - floor(am) * n

Let's use it to calculate 22 mod 10:

	a = 22
	n = 10
	m = 1/n = 1/10 = 0.1

22 mod 10
	= 22 - floor(22*0.1) * 10
	= 22 - 2 * 10
	= 22 - 20
	= 2

There is one more issue left - bit reflection. Some CRCs are defined to operate on the least significant bit first (eg CRC32c). Lets look at how this would get laid out in a register, and lets simplify it to just two bytes (vs a 16 byte VMX register):

[ 8..15 ] [ 0..7 ]

Notice how the bits and bytes are out of order. Since we are doing multi word multiplication on these values we need them to both be in order.

The simplest way to fix this is to reflect the bits in each byte:

[ 15..8 ] [ 7..0 ]

However shuffling bits in a byte is expensive on most CPUs. It is however relatively cheap to shuffle bytes around. What if we load the bytes in reversed:

[ 0..7 ] [ 8..15 ]

Now the bits and bytes are in order, except the least significant bit of the register is now on the left and the most significant bit is on the right. We operate as if the register is reflected, which normally we cannot do. The reason we get away with this is our multiplies are carryless and our addition and subtraction is xor, so our operations never create carries.

The only trick is we have to shift the result of multiplies left one because the high bit of the multiply is always 0, and we want that high bit on the right not the left.

The vpmsum instructions on POWER8 have a 6 cycle latency and we can execute one every cycle. In light of this the main loop has 8 parallel streams which consume 8 x 16 B each iteration. At the completion of this loop we have taken 32 kB of data and reduced it to 8 x 16 B (128 B).

The next step is to take this 128 B and reduce it to 8 B. At this stage we also add 32 bits of 0 to the end.

We then apply Barrett reduction to get our CRC.

• barrett_reduction: An example of Barrett reduction

• final_fold: Starting with 128 bits, add 32 bits of zeros and reduce it to 64 bits, then apply Barrett reduction

• final_fold2: A second method of reduction

The kernel sets the PPC_FEATURE2_VEC_CRYPTO bit in the HWCAP2 field when the vpmsum instructions are available. An example of run time detection:

#include <sys/auxv.h>

#ifndef PPC_FEATURE2_VEC_CRYPTO
#define PPC_FEATURE2_VEC_CRYPTO	0x02000000
#endif

#ifndef AT_HWCAP2
#define AT_HWCAP2	26
#endif

...

	if (getauxval(AT_HWCAP2) & PPC_FEATURE2_VEC_CRYPTO) {
		/* Use crc32-vpmsum optimised version */
	} else {
		/* fall back to non accelerated version */
	}

Thanks to Michael Gschwind, Jeff Derby, Lorena Pesantez and Stewart Smith for their ideas and assistance.

Thanks Rogerio Alves for writing the C implementation.

Thanks Daniel Black for cleanup and testing.