Profiling newlib-nano's memcpy
Newlib is a very popular libc targeting embedded systems. It’s the libc that ships with the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain published by ARM.
This article takes a look at one of the commonly used functions provided by the
Newlib C library: memcpy. We’ll examine the default nano implementation and
the performance implications, comparing it against the faster non-default
implementation.
Table of Contents
Source for memcpy in Newlib-nano
You can find the implementation of the Newlib-nano memcpy function here:
If you’re using the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain, you can find the exact source
for the newlib library it ships by downloading the source tarball from the Arm
download page; for example, gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.07-src.tar.bz2 is the
latest at the moment.
Looking at the implementation, we can see that it’s conditionally compiled in 2 different ways:
void *
__inhibit_loop_to_libcall
memcpy (void *__restrict dst0,
const void *__restrict src0,
size_t len0)
{
#if defined(PREFER_SIZE_OVER_SPEED) || defined(__OPTIMIZE_SIZE__)
char *dst = (char *) dst0;
char *src = (char *) src0;
void *save = dst0;
while (len0--)
{
*dst++ = *src++;
}
return save;
#else
// this section skipped for brevity
...
#endif /* not PREFER_SIZE_OVER_SPEED */
}
The default compilation used by the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain is with -O2 as
the optimization level; however, newlib is also built with -Os for the “nano”
variant (both are provided with the pre-built toolchain). We can check this by
looking at the source tarball, where the build script sets these CFLAGS (see
build-toolchain.sh line 382):
saveenvvar CFLAGS_FOR_TARGET '-g -Os -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections'
When compiling with optimization level -Os, the GCC compiler will set #define
__OPTIMIZE_SIZE__ 1 as a built-in define. You can see this by running the
following command, which dumps the built-in preprocessor definitions to stdout:
arm-none-eabi-gcc -Os -dM -E - < /dev/null
# diff between -O2 and -Os
diff -du1w <(arm-none-eabi-gcc -O2 -dM -E - < /dev/null) <(arm-none-eabi-gcc -Os -dM -E - < /dev/null)
@@ -317,2 +317,3 @@
#define __UINT64_TYPE__ long long unsigned int
+#define __OPTIMIZE_SIZE__ 1
#define __LLFRACT_MAX__ 0X7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFP-63LLR
This results in the bytewise memcpy implementation we saw above!
while (len0--)
{
*dst++ = *src++;
}
An interesting side-effect of the bytewise implementation I’ve encountered: a program used structure assignment to initialize a set of 32-bit hardware registers. This was problematic when the compiler inserted a bytewise memcpy, because the registers would be written in 8-bit chunks, putting the hardware in an undefined state!
If we examine the other implementation (the non-size-optimized version), we can see that it attempts to copy 4-byte words at a time, which is the native word size on a Cortex-M processor, and should speed things up a lot!
/* If the size is small, or either SRC or DST is unaligned,
then punt into the byte copy loop. This should be rare. */
if (!TOO_SMALL(len0) && !UNALIGNED (src, dst))
{
aligned_dst = (long*)dst;
aligned_src = (long*)src;
/* Copy 4X long words at a time if possible. */
while (len0 >= BIGBLOCKSIZE)
{
*aligned_dst++ = *aligned_src++;
*aligned_dst++ = *aligned_src++;
*aligned_dst++ = *aligned_src++;
*aligned_dst++ = *aligned_src++;
len0 -= BIGBLOCKSIZE;
}
/* Copy one long word at a time if possible. */
while (len0 >= LITTLEBLOCKSIZE)
{
*aligned_dst++ = *aligned_src++;
len0 -= LITTLEBLOCKSIZE;
}
/* Pick up any residual with a byte copier. */
dst = (char*)aligned_dst;
src = (char*)aligned_src;
}
while (len0--)
*dst++ = *src++;
Note that some chips will have multiple-load-store or other SIMD/vector instructions that can possibly speed up the loops even more (though it’s always important to profile when playing with compiler optimizations).
Performance: speed
Let’s first take a look at the performance of this implementation by measuring the number of cycles it takes to copy different amounts of data. We’re going to do our experiment on a Cortex-M4F processor (specific chip was an STM32F407), using the Cortex-M CYCCNT register (for more information, and the implementation of the cycle-counting functions, see this post on profiling).
struct test_struct {
char data[4096];
};
// instantiate 2 structs. for our purposes, we don't care what data is in
// there. set them to `volatile` so the compiler won't optimize away what we
// do with them
volatile struct test_struct dest, source;
enable_cycle_counter(); // << Enable Cycle Counter
// run through powers-of-two memcpy's, printing stats for each test
for (size_t len = 1; len <= sizeof(dest); len <<= 1) {
uint32_t start = read_cycle_counter(); // << Start count
memcpy((void *)&dest, (void *)&source, len);
uint32_t stop = read_cycle_counter(); // << Stop count
// print out the cycles consumed
printf("len = %lu, cyccnt = %lu, cycles/byte = %0.3f\n",
(uint32_t)len, stop - start,
(float)(stop - start) / (float)len);
}
The output of this test is:
len = 1, cyccnt = 30, cycles/byte = 30.000
len = 2, cyccnt = 41, cycles/byte = 20.500
len = 4, cyccnt = 63, cycles/byte = 15.750
len = 8, cyccnt = 107, cycles/byte = 13.375
len = 16, cyccnt = 195, cycles/byte = 12.188
len = 32, cyccnt = 371, cycles/byte = 11.594
len = 64, cyccnt = 723, cycles/byte = 11.297
len = 128, cyccnt = 1427, cycles/byte = 11.148
len = 256, cyccnt = 2835, cycles/byte = 11.074
len = 512, cyccnt = 5651, cycles/byte = 11.037
len = 1024, cyccnt = 11283, cycles/byte = 11.019
len = 2048, cyccnt = 22547, cycles/byte = 11.009
len = 4096, cyccnt = 45075, cycles/byte = 11.005
To replace the default memcpy implementation with an alternative, what we can
do is:
- copy the newlib
memcpyfunction into a file in our project, egmemcpy.c - add the file to the sources we’re compiling
- we have to make a couple of modifications to get the result we want:
- add a line
#undef __OPTIMIZE_SIZE__to the file; we saw GCC will set this flag if we enable-Oswhen compiling -
add the following definition (which is present in the newlib build):
# define __inhibit_loop_to_libcall \ __attribute__ ((__optimize__ ("-fno-tree-loop-distribute-patterns")))This is required to prevent the C compiler from inserting
memcpycalls within the body of memcpy, which will end up recursing repeatedly and probably overflowing the stack 😩.
- add a line
Rebuilding, we should see our version of memcpy present if we examine the .map
file.
Running the same experiment, the results are:
len = 1, cyccnt = 44, cycles/byte = 44.000
len = 2, cyccnt = 58, cycles/byte = 29.000
len = 4, cyccnt = 86, cycles/byte = 21.500
len = 8, cyccnt = 142, cycles/byte = 17.750
len = 16, cyccnt = 71, cycles/byte = 4.438
len = 32, cyccnt = 91, cycles/byte = 2.844
len = 64, cyccnt = 131, cycles/byte = 2.047
len = 128, cyccnt = 211, cycles/byte = 1.648
len = 256, cyccnt = 371, cycles/byte = 1.449
len = 512, cyccnt = 691, cycles/byte = 1.350
len = 1024, cyccnt = 1331, cycles/byte = 1.300
len = 2048, cyccnt = 2611, cycles/byte = 1.275
len = 4096, cyccnt = 5171, cycles/byte = 1.262
At the larger sizes, this implementation is ~ 8.7 times faster!
Performance: size
Let’s compare the default implementation with the non-size-optimized one.
# built with default implementation:
❯ arm-none-eabi-nm build/main.elf --print-size | grep memcpy
0800038a 0000001c T memcpy
# built with the faster, larger implementation
❯ arm-none-eabi-nm build/main.elf --print-size | grep memcpy
08000010 00000094 T memcpy
That’s 148 bytes (0x94 hex) vs. 28 bytes (0x1c hex), or 120 bytes larger.
memcpy calls inserted during compilation
One side effect of replacing memcpy in the entire executable is that the C
compiler will often insert calls to memcpy when performing certain operations-
for example, when initializing a struct. See an example here:
https://godbolt.org/z/ar3rPdv85
This can have significant performance implications if you have a hot path that
is using C structs for passing data; you might see memcpy end up at the top of
your profiling results.
Newlib’s non-nano implementation
The above version of memcpy is the one used when linking with
--specs=nano.specs; the “nano” version of libc, which is intended to optimize
for code space (the nano specs override some libraries with the “nano” variant,
see
here).
Linking without selecting the nano specs yields a much larger binary (in the
test repo, my application went from ~17kB to ~33kB). However, not only do the
non-nano versions more closely match glibc implementations (eg more
printf/scanf formatters are supported by default), the implementations tend to
be much more optimized for speed. This implementation of memcpy is 308 bytes-
it’s implemented in assembly with several unrolled loop optimizations:
The same test as we did above results in:
len = 1, cyccnt = 39, cycles/byte = 39.000
len = 2, cyccnt = 40, cycles/byte = 20.000
len = 4, cyccnt = 37, cycles/byte = 9.250
len = 8, cyccnt = 45, cycles/byte = 5.625
len = 16, cyccnt = 43, cycles/byte = 2.688
len = 32, cyccnt = 60, cycles/byte = 1.875
len = 64, cyccnt = 81, cycles/byte = 1.266
len = 128, cyccnt = 134, cycles/byte = 1.047
len = 256, cyccnt = 240, cycles/byte = 0.938
len = 512, cyccnt = 452, cycles/byte = 0.883
len = 1024, cyccnt = 876, cycles/byte = 0.855
len = 2048, cyccnt = 1724, cycles/byte = 0.842
len = 4096, cyccnt = 3420, cycles/byte = 0.835
About 13x faster than the original newlib-nano implementation! 🥳
Outro
That’s all for this article! Hopefully we’ve illuminated an interesting nook inside the Newlib C library, and shown a way to quickly compare (lib)c function implementations.
You can see the example project here:
https://github.com/noahp/pico-c-cortex-m/tree/c7e9a3178ff7b11828482af989e216c75cd696a2
See anything you'd like to change? Submit a pull request or open an issue on our GitHub
Noah Pendleton is an embedded software engineer at Memfault. Noah previously worked on embedded software teams at Fitbit and Markforged.