Serious performance degradation of math functions
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
GLibC |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
|||
glibc (Fedora) |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
|||
glibc (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Matthias Klose | ||
Xenial |
Fix Released
|
High
|
Daniel Axtens | ||
Zesty |
Won't Fix
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
SRU Justification
=================
[Impact]
* Severe performance hit on many maths-heavy workloads. For example, a user reports linpack performance of 13 Gflops on Trusty and Bionic and 3.9 Gflops on Xenial.
* Because the impact is so large (>3x) and Xenial is supported until 2021, the fix should be backported.
* The fix avoids an AVX-SSE transition penalty. It stops _dl_runtime_
[Test Case]
Firstly, you need a suitable Intel machine. Users report that Sandy
Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell CPUs are affected, and I
have been able to reproduce it on a Skylake CPU using a suitable Azure
VM.
Create the following C file, exp.c:
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main () {
double a, b;
for (a = b = 0.0; b < 2.0; b += 0.00000005) a += exp(b);
printf("%f\n", a);
return 0;
}
$ gcc -O3 -march=x86-64 -o exp exp.c -lm
With the current version of glibc:
$ time ./exp
...
real 0m1.349s
user 0m1.349s
$ time LD_BIND_NOW=1 ./exp
...
real 0m0.625s
user 0m0.621s
Observe that LD_BIND_NOW makes a big difference as it avoids the call to _dl_runtime_
With the proposed update:
$ time ./exp
...
real 0m0.625s
user 0m0.621s
$ time LD_BIND_NOW=1 ./exp
...
real 0m0.631s
user 0m0.631s
Observe that the normal case is faster, and LD_BIND_NOW makes a negligible difference.
[Regression Potential]
glibc is the nightmare case for regressions as could affect pretty much
anything, and this patch touches a key part (dynamic libraries).
We can be fairly confident in the fix generally - it's in the glibc in
Bionic, Debian and some RPM-based distros. The backport is based on
the patches in the release/2.23/master branch in the upstream glibc
repository, and the backport was straightforward.
Obviously that doesn't remove all risk. There is also a fair bit of
Ubuntu-specific patching in glibc so other distros are of limited
value for ruling out bugs. So I have done the following testing, and
I'm happy to do more as required. All testing has been done:
- on an Azure VM (affected by the change), with proposed package
- on a local VM (not affected by the change), with proposed package
* Boot with the upgraded libc6.
* Watch a youtube video in Firefox over VNC.
* Build some C code (debuild of zlib).
* Test Java by installing and running Eclipse.
Autopkgtest also passes.
[Original Description]
Bug [0] has been introduced in Glibc 2.23 [1] and fixed in Glibc 2.25 [2]. All Ubuntu versions starting from 16.04 are affected because they use either Glibc 2.23 or 2.24. Bug introduces serious (2x-4x) performance degradation of math functions (pow, exp/exp2/exp10, log/log2/log10, sin/cos/sincos/tan, asin/acos/
@strikov: According to a quite reliable source [5] all AMD CPUs and latest Intel CPUs (Skylake and Knights Landing) don't suffer from AVX/SSE transition penalty. It means that the scope of this bug becomes smaller and includes only the following generations of Intel's CPUs: Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell. Scope still remains quite large though.
@strikov: Ubuntu 16.10/17.04 which use Glibc 2.24 may recieve the fix from upstream 2.24 branch (as Marcel pointed out, fix has been backported to 2.24 branch where Fedora took it successfully) if such synchronization will take place. Ubuntu 16.04 (the main target of this bug) uses Glibc 2.23 which hasn't been patched upstream and will suffer from performance degradation until we fix it manually.
This bug is all about AVX-SSE transition penalty [3]. 256-bit YMM registers used by AVX-256 instructions extend 128-bit registers used by SSE (XMM0 is a low half of YMM0 and so on). Every time CPU executes SSE instruction after AVX-256 instruction it has to store upper half of the YMM register to the internal buffer and then restore it when execution returns back to AVX instructions. Store/restore is required because old-fashioned SSE knows nothing about the upper halves of its registers and may damage them. This store/restore operation is time consuming (several tens of clock cycles for each operation). To deal with this issue, Intel introduced AVX-128 instructions which operate on the same 128-bit XMM register as SSE but take into account upper halves of YMM registers. Hence, no store/restore required. Practically speaking, AVX-128 instructions is a new smart form of SSE instructions which can be used together with full-size AVX-256 instructions without any penalty. Intel recommends to use AVX-128 instructions instead of SSE instructions wherever possible. To sum things up, it's okay to mix SSE with AVX-128 and AVX-128 with AVX-256. Mixing AVX-128 with AVX-256 is allowed because both types of instructions are aware of 256-bit YMM registers. Mixing SSE with AVX-128 is okay because CPU can guarantee that the upper halves of YMM registers don't contain any meaningful data (how one can put it there without using AVX-256 instructions) and avoid doing store/restore operation (why to care about random trash in the upper halves of the YMM registers). It's not okay to mix SSE with AVX-256 due to the transition penalty. Scalar floating-point instructions used by routines mentioned above are implemented as a subset of SSE and AVX-128 instructions. They operate on a small fraction of 128-bit register but still considered SSE/AVX-128 instruction. And they suffer from SSE/AVX transition penalty as well.
Glibc inadvertently triggers a chain of AVX/SSE transition penalties due to inappropriate use of AVX-256 instructions inside _dl_runtime_
Buggy _dl_runtime_
There are two types of math routines provided by libm:
(a) ones that have AVX-optimized version (exp, sin/cos, tan, atan, log and other)
(b) ones that don't have AVX-optimized version and rely on general purpose SSE implementation (pow, exp2/exp10, asin/acos, sinh/cosh/tanh, asinh/acosh/atanh and others)
For the former group of routines slowdown happens when they get called from SSE code (i.e. from the application compiled with -mno-avx) because SSE -> AVX transition takes place. For the latter one slowdown happens when routines get called from AVX code (i.e. from the application compiled with -mavx) because AVX -> SSE transition takes place. Both situations look realistic. SSE code gets generated by gcc to target x86-64 and AVX-optimized code gets generated by gcc -march=native on AVX-capable machines.
=======
Let's take one routine from the group (a) and try to reproduce the slowdown.
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main () {
double a, b;
for (a = b = 0.0; b < 2.0; b += 0.00000005) a += exp(b);
printf("%f\n", a);
return 0;
}
$ gcc -O3 -march=x86-64 -o exp exp.c -lm
$ time ./exp
<..> 2.801s <..>
$ time LD_BIND_NOW=1 ./exp
<..> 0.660s <..>
You can see that application demonstrates 4x better performance when _dl_runtime_
=======
Let's take one routine from the group (b) and try to reproduce the slowdown.
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main () {
double a, b;
for (a = b = 0.0; b < 2.0; b += 0.00000005) a += pow(M_PI, b);
printf("%f\n", a);
return 0;
}
# note that -mavx option has been passed
$ gcc -O3 -march=x86-64 -mavx -o pow pow.c -lm
$ time ./pow
<..> 4.157s <..>
$ time LD_BIND_NOW=1 ./pow
<..> 2.123s <..>
You can see that application demonstrates 2x better performance when _dl_runtime_
=======
[!] It's important to mention that the context of this bug might be even wider. After a call to buggy _dl_runtime_
[0] https:/
[1] https:/
[2] https:/
[3] https:/
[4] https:/
[5] http://
Related branches
- Simon Quigley (community): Needs Resubmitting
- Steve Langasek (community): Abstain
- Andreas Hasenack: Abstain
- Ubuntu Foundations Team: Pending requested
-
Diff: 825 lines (+797/-0)4 files modifieddebian/changelog (+9/-0)
debian/patches/series (+2/-0)
debian/patches/ubuntu/xsave-part1.diff (+619/-0)
debian/patches/ubuntu/xsave-part2.diff (+167/-0)
description: | updated |
Changed in glibc: | |
importance: | Unknown → Medium |
status: | Unknown → Fix Released |
tags: | added: upgrade-software-version xenial yakkety zesty |
summary: |
- Serious performance degradation of math functions in 16.04/16.10/17.04 - due to known Glibc bug + Serious performance degradation of math functions |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Zesty): | |
importance: | Undecided → Medium |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | nobody → Matthias Klose (doko) |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu): | |
status: | Confirmed → Triaged |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Zesty): | |
status: | Confirmed → Triaged |
Changed in glibc (Fedora): | |
importance: | Unknown → Undecided |
status: | Unknown → Fix Released |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
status: | New → Confirmed |
assignee: | nobody → Daniel Axtens (daxtens) |
description: | updated |
tags: | added: sts |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
importance: | Undecided → Medium |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
status: | Confirmed → In Progress |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
importance: | Medium → Low |
Changed in glibc (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
importance: | Low → High |
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.