Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

unix: reduce the size of DirEntry #94750

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Mar 9, 2022
Merged

Conversation

cuviper
Copy link
Member

@cuviper cuviper commented Mar 8, 2022

On platforms where we call readdir instead of readdir_r, we store
the name as an allocated CString for variable length. There's no point
carrying around a full dirent64 with its fixed-length d_name too.

On platforms where we call `readdir` instead of `readdir_r`, we store
the name as an allocated `CString` for variable length. There's no point
carrying around a full `dirent64` with its fixed-length `d_name` too.
@rust-highfive
Copy link
Collaborator

r? @joshtriplett

(rust-highfive has picked a reviewer for you, use r? to override)

@rust-highfive rust-highfive added the S-waiting-on-review Status: Awaiting review from the assignee but also interested parties. label Mar 8, 2022
@joshtriplett
Copy link
Member

@bors r+

@bors
Copy link
Contributor

bors commented Mar 9, 2022

📌 Commit e8b9ba8 has been approved by joshtriplett

@bors bors added S-waiting-on-bors Status: Waiting on bors to run and complete tests. Bors will change the label on completion. and removed S-waiting-on-review Status: Awaiting review from the assignee but also interested parties. labels Mar 9, 2022
@bors
Copy link
Contributor

bors commented Mar 9, 2022

⌛ Testing commit e8b9ba8 with merge 163c207...

@bors
Copy link
Contributor

bors commented Mar 9, 2022

☀️ Test successful - checks-actions
Approved by: joshtriplett
Pushing 163c207 to master...

@bors bors added the merged-by-bors This PR was explicitly merged by bors. label Mar 9, 2022
@bors bors merged commit 163c207 into rust-lang:master Mar 9, 2022
@rustbot rustbot added this to the 1.61.0 milestone Mar 9, 2022
@rust-timer
Copy link
Collaborator

Finished benchmarking commit (163c207): comparison url.

Summary: This benchmark run did not return any relevant results.

If you disagree with this performance assessment, please file an issue in rust-lang/rustc-perf.

@rustbot label: -perf-regression

@cuviper cuviper deleted the dirent64_min branch April 12, 2022 17:54
bors added a commit to rust-lang-ci/rust that referenced this pull request Oct 23, 2022
Eliminate 280-byte memset from ReadDir iterator

This guy:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/1536ab1b383f21b38f8d49230a2aecc51daffa3d/library/std/src/sys/unix/fs.rs#L589

It turns out `libc::dirent64` is quite big—https://docs.rs/libc/0.2.135/libc/struct.dirent64.html. In rust-lang#103135 this memset accounted for 0.9% of the runtime of iterating a big directory.

Almost none of the big zeroed value is ever used. We memcpy a tiny prefix (19 bytes) into it, and then read just 9 bytes (`d_ino` and `d_type`) back out. We can read exactly those 9 bytes we need directly from the original entry_ptr instead.

## History

This code got added in rust-lang#93459 and tweaked in rust-lang#94272 and rust-lang#94750.

Prior to rust-lang#93459, there was no memset but a full 280 bytes were being copied from the entry_ptr.

<table><tr><td>copy 280 bytes</td></tr></table>

This was not legal because not all of those bytes might be initialized, or even allocated, depending on the length of the directory entry's name, leading to a segfault. That PR fixed the segfault by creating a new zeroed dirent64 and copying just the guaranteed initialized prefix into it.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td></tr></table>

However this was still buggy because it used `addr_of!((*entry_ptr).d_name)`, which is considered UB by Miri in the case that the full extent of entry_ptr is not in bounds of the same allocation. (Arguably this shouldn't be a requirement, but here we are.)

The UB got fixed by rust-lang#94272 by replacing `addr_of` with some pointer manipulation based on `offset_from`, but still fundamentally the same operation.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td></tr></table>

Then rust-lang#94750 noticed that only 9 of those 19 bytes were even being used, so we could pick out only those 9 to put in the ReadDir value.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td><td>copy 9 bytes</td></tr></table>

After my PR we just grab the 9 needed bytes directly from entry_ptr.

<table><tr><td>copy 9 bytes</td></tr></table>

The resulting code is more complex but I believe still worthwhile to land for the following reason. This is an extremely straightforward thing to accomplish in C and clearly libc assumes that; literally just `entry_ptr->d_name`. The extra work in comparison to accomplish it in Rust is not an example of any actual safety being provided by Rust. I believe it's useful to have uncovered that and think about what could be done in the standard library or language to support this obvious operation better.

## References

- https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readdir.3.html
Aaron1011 pushed a commit to Aaron1011/rust that referenced this pull request Jan 6, 2023
Eliminate 280-byte memset from ReadDir iterator

This guy:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/1536ab1b383f21b38f8d49230a2aecc51daffa3d/library/std/src/sys/unix/fs.rs#L589

It turns out `libc::dirent64` is quite big&mdash;https://docs.rs/libc/0.2.135/libc/struct.dirent64.html. In rust-lang#103135 this memset accounted for 0.9% of the runtime of iterating a big directory.

Almost none of the big zeroed value is ever used. We memcpy a tiny prefix (19 bytes) into it, and then read just 9 bytes (`d_ino` and `d_type`) back out. We can read exactly those 9 bytes we need directly from the original entry_ptr instead.

## History

This code got added in rust-lang#93459 and tweaked in rust-lang#94272 and rust-lang#94750.

Prior to rust-lang#93459, there was no memset but a full 280 bytes were being copied from the entry_ptr.

<table><tr><td>copy 280 bytes</td></tr></table>

This was not legal because not all of those bytes might be initialized, or even allocated, depending on the length of the directory entry's name, leading to a segfault. That PR fixed the segfault by creating a new zeroed dirent64 and copying just the guaranteed initialized prefix into it.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td></tr></table>

However this was still buggy because it used `addr_of!((*entry_ptr).d_name)`, which is considered UB by Miri in the case that the full extent of entry_ptr is not in bounds of the same allocation. (Arguably this shouldn't be a requirement, but here we are.)

The UB got fixed by rust-lang#94272 by replacing `addr_of` with some pointer manipulation based on `offset_from`, but still fundamentally the same operation.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td></tr></table>

Then rust-lang#94750 noticed that only 9 of those 19 bytes were even being used, so we could pick out only those 9 to put in the ReadDir value.

<table><tr><td>memset 280 bytes</td><td>copy 19 bytes</td><td>copy 9 bytes</td></tr></table>

After my PR we just grab the 9 needed bytes directly from entry_ptr.

<table><tr><td>copy 9 bytes</td></tr></table>

The resulting code is more complex but I believe still worthwhile to land for the following reason. This is an extremely straightforward thing to accomplish in C and clearly libc assumes that; literally just `entry_ptr->d_name`. The extra work in comparison to accomplish it in Rust is not an example of any actual safety being provided by Rust. I believe it's useful to have uncovered that and think about what could be done in the standard library or language to support this obvious operation better.

## References

- https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readdir.3.html
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
merged-by-bors This PR was explicitly merged by bors. S-waiting-on-bors Status: Waiting on bors to run and complete tests. Bors will change the label on completion.
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

None yet

6 participants