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linux/arch
Puranjay Mohan b1d6bd5462 bpf, arm64: Use ORR-based MOV for general-purpose registers
The A64_MOV macro unconditionally uses ADD Rd, Rn, #0 to implement
register moves. While functionally correct, this is not the canonical
encoding when both operands are general-purpose registers.

On AArch64, MOV has two aliases depending on the operand registers:
  - MOV <Xd|SP>, <Xn|SP>  →  ADD <Xd|SP>, <Xn|SP>, #0
  - MOV <Xd>, <Xn>        →  ORR <Xd>, XZR, <Xn>

The ADD form is required when the stack pointer is involved (as ORR
does not accept SP), while the ORR form is the preferred encoding for
general-purpose registers.

The ORR encoding is also measurably faster on modern microarchitectures.
A microbenchmark [1] comparing dependent chains of MOV (ORR) vs ADD #0
on an ARM Neoverse-V2 (72-core, 3.4 GHz) shows:

  === mov (ORR Xd, XZR, Xn) ===
  run1 cycles/op=0.749859456
  run2 cycles/op=0.749991250
  run3 cycles/op=0.749601847
  avg cycles/op=0.749817518

  === add0 (ADD Xd, Xn, #0) ===
  run1 cycles/op=1.004777689
  run2 cycles/op=1.004558266
  run3 cycles/op=1.004806559
  avg cycles/op=1.004714171

The ORR form completes in ~0.75 cycles/op vs ~1.00 cycles/op for ADD #0,
a ~25% improvement. This is likely because the CPU's register renaming
hardware can eliminate ORR-based moves, while ADD #0 must go through the
ALU pipeline.

Update A64_MOV to select the appropriate encoding at JIT time:
use ADD when either register is A64_SP, and ORR (via
aarch64_insn_gen_move_reg()) otherwise.

Update verifier_private_stack selftests to expect "mov x7, x0" instead
of "add x7, x0, #0x0" in the JITed instruction checks, matching the
new ORR-based encoding.

[1] https://github.com/puranjaymohan/scripts/blob/main/arm64/bench/run_mov_vs_add0.sh

Signed-off-by: Puranjay Mohan <puranjay@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Xu Kuohai <xukuohai@huawei.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260225134339.2723288-1-puranjay@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
2026-03-03 08:43:10 -08:00
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