Destiny is no Mercenary.

'cause i had a spare arvo and not much to do I downloaded the "Destiny" beta since it was 'opened' for the weekend. Its probably not a game I was going to get anyway but I thought i'd have a look. I find the way they've implemented the multiplayer interesting; even if it isn't something I want to do myself.

While it was downloading I got my other parallella working - which took a good chunk of the afternoon because it took me a while to discover that the sd-card wasn't actually in a ready-state. I didn't check it to start with because the only machine i have with a sdhc card slot has a dying fan so i've put it away. So i had to dig it out, download the images, copy them across, write them a few times because they weren't working, ... whilst trying to stop the laptop overheating (although the fan righted itself enough in the end). Well it booted and a usb keyboard worked but I didn't want to get out a hub so I logged on via ssh, fixed the shell (tcsh, tcsh, no no!) and shut it down to await another day.

Back to Destiny. As one would expect from a game with so much money spent on it, it's pretty polished in the game part - apart from the super-chunky shadow maps on the PS3 and the lack of the ability to properly invert the controls (who the fuck would want to only invert y and not x too??). Well the game bits are polished, the story seems a bit corny and just just badly acted - but it is just the beta so one shouldn't expect much. The hub seems too much like a "mall" in Playstation Home though; they just need some chess tables and a bowling alley.

I didn't get far before basically not being able to progress due to being shit at the game (with no help from the fucking camera controls) and so kinda gave up. Actually i'd been doing ok by being cautious and methodical but was overwhelmed by a specific situation which seems designed to force you to team up with other players. But i'm just not in a sociable mood so I just went back outside and wandered around jumping off cliffs to misadventurous[sic] deaths and taking pot shots of baddies and drones until other players started showing up in number. Since I didn't really want to socialise I quit back to tv.

Actually apart from the camera controls the most annoying thing was the menu's - they're all operated with a joystick-driven mouse pointer 'big dot', which sucks as much as it sounds. Just use the bloody direction buttons, it's a lot easier/faster. The music did nothing for me either; a bit too nicey softly-epic. Too Spielberg.

Playing it got me thinking about Mercenary: Escape from Targ. Or at least, wishing there was a game more like that instead.

Crash land on a planet, half way between two separate races/groups who are at war, you play them off each other and earn enough money to buy a ship to leave (or trade your way to find one, iirc there were multiple ways to escape). I think there was one gun, a few ground-cars, a couple of planes (which you could crash and destroy; basically ending the game unless you wanted to walk for hours) and a couple of space-capable ships. Teleports, lifts, an underground multi-room complex or two, and i think a space station (this is really stretching my memory so i could be out). One item which most ties in with Destiny specifically is the "9th generation (pocket?) pc" you have which constantly talks you through the game; acting as a guide, translator, atm, companion.

All whilst walking (and/or flying) around in 1st person perspective "3d".

Released in 1985. You know, back when 1st person 3d games just didn't exist.

Obviously graphically crude by today's standards and probably not something I would have the patience to play in its original form of 160x200-odd pixel playfield in 4-colours-at-once glory at 3-4 frames per second (if that), and even then the 'objects' were so far apart you could only see one at a time (one building, or a couple of trees). But I finished it at least once (maybe twice) and the story made a hell of a lot more sense than some of the stuff coming out these days even if i didn't realise it even had one at the time.

The story in Titanfall for example: completely barmey, you have giant space-based factories generating 'super-robots' with papier-mâché-like fragility which are delivered from space to a tiny battle arena so that drugged-up flying super-soldiers can shoot them to bits with pop guns. Why not just blow up the space-factory? Why not just drop big fucking bombs instead? The whole economics of the story as a war doesn't make any sense whatsoever. (I haven't played it, not likely to ever). As a multiplayer game at least, it just seems to be Brockian Ultra Cricket with mechs, but with a nonsense backstory that makes even less sense than if that's what it was really called.

Destiny at least has some basic coherence to the story on the surface (and sci-fi enough to be given some lee-way). But what the fuck are all the people in that giant city doing? Playing houses and looking at the sunset whilst these alien invaders come to wipe them out from existence? Cities are literally giant factories for making shit: they'd be pumping out war machines for their defense, not relying on a rag-tag group of ?resurrected? Boba Fett's roaming the wild-lands and salvaging incrementally-better shit from a planet full of wasted junk.

I guess the problem is these types of games are designed to never end so they need some artificial hook to keep people coming back. And the story has to be bent to breaking point around these mechanics. Traditional RPGs get away with it because you are meant to be a neophyte random traveller wandering around killing shit and learning your trade, not one of 'many' man's 'only' hope against utter annihilation .

Maybe No Man's Sky will capture the essence of games like Mercenary. It certainly sounds like it might so far although some of the details are a bit thin on the ground. Actually i'm sure nothing probably ever will be because nothing will ever be the same as when I played it; mostly me.

I didn't really know much about it until watching that excellent video and endearing presentation on Sony's stage at E3. I think Gamespot did a series of very good background stories on it as well. I've dabbled in some extremely simple procedural world ideas but never got anywhere - the thought you could create a whole galaxy of realistic if 30s sci-fi inspired solar systems and planets complete with atmospheres, fauna and flora, and motion thereof - all from a deterministic seeded algorithm, ... and in real-time. Mind-blowing.

The scale is really what is amazing here. As the good books says, space is big, really big ... there would be no way to create a game of this size and detail any other way; it would never fit on a disk and couldn't be downloaded. It could only ever be created dynamically/procedurally, and it could never be done in such fidelity without the memory and processing power of modern computers. The easiest way I can think of visualising how they've done it is by looking at the set of julia sets: very simple rules create it, a given location always looks the same, but there is also infinite detail and an infinite number of sets. A similar multi-dimensional number surface must be driving the physical rules which are then used to create the worlds. It's not random - otherwise you'd end up with blended pea soup colour palettes and flying ratchet screwdrivers. In fact nothing can be random otherwise it couldn't possibly work. Bummer about the ratchet screwdrivers ... although there's always the possibility of easter eggs.

I really hope they can pull it off; even if i don't get into it as a game or the rest of the game doesn't reach the same bar; the technology shown so far is phenomenal and has incredible possibilities for the future. I guess I might have to get PS4 for it if driveclub hasn't done that already by then - that looks an absolute corker and I loved their WRC games (motorstorms were good too but the WRC games had a certain feel that was missing).

Actually this also reminds me of another C64 game. The Sentinel. It had 10 000 levels in a single tape load. And must have been procedurally generated, in '86. There's another game ripe for a remake. I never played it much or got very far when I did but when that scanner went static it was scary as hell - it took so long to rotate you didn't have room for mistakes.

ext4 ... data loss, what? why?

Somehow this passed me by over the years because I never liked ext3 either and avoided it but boy is ext4 shit. Apparently it wont flush anything to disk unless f(data)sync() is called which means on a system that I crash as much as the parallella i'm often left with empty files all over the place - from a compile i ran 20 minutes ago. Fortunately emacs must be calling fsync and so i haven't lost any "real work". Running "sync" often takes ages too since it's decided to leave all the writes since boot-up lying around in ram.

Despite any arguments to the contrary it's pretty obvious why ext4 was broken in this way: blah blah ... benchmarks look better ... blah blah.

I just can't believe the distro "community" or any sysadmin actually puts up with this sort of nonsense given there are so many other (excellent, stable) filesystems to choose from. For a so-called meritorious-based "community" this reeks of the same type of following the "industry default" that lead to the disastrous wintel-fucked-over lost-decade of the 90s.

Come on, it's just shit, use something else. There's no excuse. And rather than focusing on benchmarks, isn't it about time the filesystem writers focussed on robustness? I mean come on, why the fuck do I still have to unmount a removable disk before taking it out? That's some other fucked-up-shit that was introduced in the 90s.

I got sick of it so a few weeks ago I changed to developing on the parallella via a nfs disk. Since the TOD clock on my rev0 board is out of whack since changing to the rev1 distro (drifts about 1s per minute) i'm usually editing and compiling on my workstation as well; which makes everything quicker and easier as a bonus. I have a rev1.1 board but haven't tried it yet because the rev0 is working well enough for what i'm doing and my desk is a bit cramped (hmm, but should do a burn-in test soon).

I was looking into a NAS box to just centralise all the "bulk" filesystems of all my computers but couldn't decide on one to buy and then thought that since they were probably running gnu/linux anyway I could at least see if it would be workable (it is). I probably don't even need that magnitude of space anyway: I had another workstation just running to record tv using mythtv for the last few years - but I stopped watching any of it months ago and last time the power went out during a storm I just left it turned off (mysql is another piece of shit so it usually requires some massaging to work after a reboot too, so i saved myself some hassles). It wasn't the original goal/use of the machine it's just that it's in a poor location and then I got other computers.

I did get a usb drive instead, which was probably a bit pointless in hindsight and it's just sitting on the other one I barely use, collecting copious amounts of dust infront of the telly. It seemed like a good idea at the time; I guess i'll get a nas box one day although not for archiving movies or tv series i'm just not going to end up watching.

Commercial TV here is almost unwatchable now with a recording and even with a recording it's a hassle skipping through the ads - there is almost more ads than tv and it's often the same annoying ones over and over again. I'm barely watching the footy this year either - which is normally something to have in the background at least during a wintry weekend: when channel 7's "a-team" are commentating it's just too hard to watch with the sound on at all - fuck fuck bruce macevaney[sic] and all his fucking inane and repetitive one-liners - and i've had more than enough of bunnings "team members" telling me about their shitty cheap imported junk every time a goal gets kicked. And since channel 7 bought the SANFL rights they barely show any games - ABC at least had one match of the week every week, with no fucking ads (actually 7 are showing less national games too, pushing people to their paytv stuff). Most of the rest of the "content" is pretty crap anyway (dumbed down way too much, and/or based on idiotic premises), or repeated to overload. Lately the thing on commercial tv seems to be to show a series as fast as possible by showing 2 or 3 (or more) back to back, once a week until they're all shown. Must be some marketing junk about 'captive' audience but I can't see that working for long if they then repeat the same short series every 6 months and when tv's come with video recorders built in.

I guess on the plus side ... it means i've been doing a lot more hacking.

It's my weekly RDO today, not sure what to do. Should get a quote for solar hot-water or new stove-top or a good number of other things to do around the house but, well, I just don't want to deal with it. Too cold to do much outside - i think the storms have cleared up but a full day of still grey overcast sucks the heat out of the world. Should at least run the vacuum around a bit and load the dishwasher. After that I might do some hacking if i can think of anything interesting to hack on although my brain is still a bit fried from ezetime and work. I've been cranky as hell this week from work and interrupted sleep so maybe I should just do a bit of fuck all.

how ffast can a fmadd fm & add?

Someone asked on the parallella forums how to get that 1-cycle-per fused multiply-add thing to work. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get it out of the compiler as it stands right now so I didn't even try but I had a look at doing it in assembly language. I was going to post this there but i remembered it doesn't use pre-formatting for code blocks, and it's kind of interesting anyway.

The basic technique is straightforward: double-word loads must be used to load every floating point value otherwise there are too may ialu ops, and once that is established one just needs enough of a calculation to fit in a loop to remove all dependency stalls by unrolling it some number of times.

The details are important though, my first cut didn't delay the fmadd's enough - but ezetime showed this very obviously so it was easy enough to fix.

Actually it's not that straightforward: the inner loop itself also needs to be pipelined - so not only is it unrolled 8 times the 8 steps have been split into two stages temporally separated by half a loop each so it's "effectively" been unrolled 16x. Infact it's a bit better than that because no amount of loop unrolling could hide the data loads completely if each loop were independent. In this case it just needs to perform 0.75 loops incoming (all the loads and half the flops) and 0.25 loops outgoing (the remaining half the flops) outside of the loop to prepare/complete the calculation so the loop count is set to one less than required.

So here's a dump from running ezetime over the assembled code. Of interest is the inner loop where every instruction pair dual-issues and a new fmadd is issued every cycle.

                                          0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123
          _fmadd:
00000000:       movts.l special.0.5,r2   |   ---1                                                         |3
00000004:       mov.l   r2,#0x0000       |    ---1                                                        |3
00000008:       movts.s special.0.6,r2   |        ---1                                                    |3
0000000a:       mov.l   r2,#0x0000       |         ---1                                                   |3
0000000e:       movts.s special.0.7,r2   |             ---1                                               |3
00000010:       mov.l   r16,#0x0000      |              ---1                                              |3
00000014:       mov.l   r17,#0x0000      |                  1                                             |
00000018:       mov.l   r18,#0x0000      |                   1                                            |
0000001c:       mov.l   r19,#0x0000      |                    1                                           |
00000020:       mov.l   r20,#0x0000      |                     1                                          |
00000024:       mov.l   r21,#0x0000      |                      1                                         |
00000028:       mov.l   r22,#0x0000      |                       1                                        |
0000002c:       mov.l   r23,#0x0000      |                        1                                       |
00000030:       ldrd.l  r48,[r0],#+1     |                         12                                     |
00000034:       ldrd.l  r56,[r1],#+1     |                          12                                    |
00000038:       ldrd.l  r50,[r0],#+1     |                           12                                   |
0000003c:       ldrd.l  r58,[r1],#+1     |                            12                                  |
00000040:       ldrd.l  r52,[r0],#+1    /|                             12                                 |
00000044:       fmadd.l r16,r48,r56     \|                             1234                               |
00000048:       ldrd.l  r60,[r1],#+1    /|                              12                                |
0000004c:       fmadd.l r17,r49,r57     \|                              1234                              |
00000050:       ldrd.l  r54,[r0],#+1    /|                               12                               |
00000054:       fmadd.l r18,r50,r58     \|                               1234                             |
00000058:       ldrd.l  r62,[r1],#+1    /|                                12                              |
0000005c:       fmadd.l r19,r51,r59     \|                                1234                            |

          hw_loop_s:
00000060:       ldrd.l  r48,[r0],#+1    /|                                 12                             |
00000064:       fmadd.l r20,r52,r60     \|                                 1234                           |
00000068:       ldrd.l  r56,[r1],#+1    /|                                  12                            |
0000006c:       fmadd.l r21,r53,r61     \|                                  1234                          |
00000070:       ldrd.l  r50,[r0],#+1    /|                                   12                           |
00000074:       fmadd.l r22,r54,r62     \|                                   1234                         |
00000078:       ldrd.l  r58,[r1],#+1    /|                                    12                          |
0000007c:       fmadd.l r23,r55,r63     \|                                    1234                        |
00000080:       ldrd.l  r52,[r0],#+1    /|                                     12                         |
00000084:       fmadd.l r16,r48,r56     \|                                     1234                       |
00000088:       ldrd.l  r60,[r1],#+1    /|                                      12                        |
0000008c:       fmadd.l r17,r49,r57     \|                                      1234                      |
00000090:       ldrd.l  r54,[r0],#+1    /|                                       12                       |
00000094:       fmadd.l r18,r50,r58     \|                                       1234                     |
00000098:       ldrd.l  r62,[r1],#+1    /|                                        12                      |
0000009c:       fmadd.l r19,r51,r59     \|                                        1234                    |

          hw_loop_e:
000000a0:       fmadd.l r20,r52,r60      |                                         1234                   |
000000a4:       fmadd.l r21,r53,r61      |                                          1234                  |
000000a8:       fmadd.l r22,r54,r62      |                                           1234                 |
000000ac:       fmadd.l r23,r55,r63      |                                            1234                |
000000b0:       fadd.l  r16,r16,r17      |                                             1234               |
000000b4:       fadd.l  r18,r18,r19      |                                              1234              |
000000b8:       fadd.l  r20,r20,r21      |                                               1234             |
000000bc:       fadd.l  r22,r22,r23      |                                                -1234           |1
000000c0:       fadd.l  r16,r16,r18      |                                                  -1234         |1
000000c4:       fadd.l  r20,r20,r22      |                                                    --1234      |2
000000c8:       fadd.l  r0,r16,r20       |                                                       ----1234 |4
000000cc:       jr.l    r14              |                                                            1   |

Over 2048 data elements it executes in 2089 cycles plus a couple dozen for the function invocation and hardware timer setup overheads. I used 2x8k buffers one in bank 1 and the other in bank 2.

Once it finishes the inner loop it completes the calculations for the data pre-loaded during the final iteration and then sums across the 8 partial sums in 3 parallel steps.

A compatible/equivalent C function taking the same args would be:

// len8s1 == element count / 8 - 1
float fmadd(const float *a, const float *b, int len8s1) {
   int count = (len8s1+1)*8;  // 'unroll' the count
   float c = 0;

   for (int i=0; i < count; i++)
      c += a[i] + b[i]; (oops)
      c += a[i] * b[i];

   return c;
}

I haven't validated that it produces the correct calculation but apart from a typo or something it should be correct.

The movts instructions near the start of the listing above are lc, ls, and le respectively (loop count, loop start, loop count) for the hardware loop feature; ezetime doesn't output the register aliases. This is also for an unlinked object so the addresses are all zero - but it sets ls to (hw_loop_e-4) for those who might understand what that means, i just put the label where it is to make the loop more readable. I fiddled with the size of the movts instructions till i got the alignment right so it doesn't need any nops for that alignment. Also, the movts instruction cycle timing isn't meant to be correct.

PS Another 8 cycles could be knocked off if the first loop just used fmul since the 8xloads of 0.0 could be removed; but then it would need 1.75 loops before starting the inner loop

JavaFX Task interface

I've been doing a bit of work on a JavaFX application turning it from a very rough prototype to a very rough product (i mean, what can one really accomplish in two weeks?). I already had a bunch of background tasks running using threads but because the original was thrown together in a rush for a small side-project I just hand-rolled everything using familiar techniques (combination of threads and ExecutorService).

I'd seen JavaFX's Task and wasn't really sure what the point was - sure it simplified a couple of things but Platform.runLater() is easy enough to use and so on.

But I found things got messy pretty fast and behaviour started leaking between abstraction layers.

So as part of this re-work I decided to "use it in anger" and see how it turned out. Quite well, if you're prepared to let JavaFX control the middle-tier of the application by using Task everywhere (and for a JavaFX application, there's no reason not to). Encapsulating the work in a Task object allows the decisions about what to do with the user interface to be decided wherever it is used; e.g. does it bother to start a spinny thing or just run silently and so on. And it handles some of the fiddly stuff so that you don't end up with a busy spinner that never runs out.

Having tasks as immutable single-use objects is how I usually write multi-thread code anyway so it wasn't much of a change (IMHO it's the only way which works). Basically all transient state needs to be captured in the job object so it can be worked on independently of the rest of the application, and all outputs are collected in a result object (memory permitting, and the size of modern memory systems makes them very permissive). If incremental updates are desirable then they can be communicated via some other mechanism although it is perhaps surprising how often incremental update just doesn't work very well for a user.

There are still some small gotchas. Say for example that you're firing off a calculation based on interaction with a slider. Ideally you want the result to update as fast as the slider does but this is often not possible. You can't just let every job run to completion because otherwise it will quickly start to lag and just feel wrong. You can't cancel every job if a new one arrives because you may never have one complete leaving the user staring at stale results. One hack is to just update the result when the user releases the slider knob but that removes most of the interactivity from the GUI and defeats the purpose.

Previously i've solved it by implementing a greedy consumer. Jobs are indivisible units which always run to completion (and to the user interface) but whenever the worker thread polls for incoming jobs it throws away all but the last one if more are queued. ExecutorService doesn't directly allow this granularity of job control but it can be emulated easily enough by something like the following.

ExecutorService queue;
Task task;

void dowork() {
   if (task != null && !task.isDone() && !task.isRunning()) {
       task.cancel();
   }

   task = new WorkTask( ... );

   task.setOnSucceeded( ... );

   queue.submit(task);
}

(is there another way? I don't know, this is what I found ...).

This isn't used for tasks which might take a very long time to complete but for ones which are already interactive speed or close to it (roughly, under 0.5s). It lets any already running jobs finish but cancels any waiting in the queue.

This makes the application "feel" much lighter and more responsive even if it does slightly more calculation than necessary. Unless the work is very trivial almost all such work needs to be thrown into a thread otherwise sliders start to feel unresponsive. This is pretty much the same for any toolkit (or os).

post weekend

I did a bit more work on the ezetool code - most improvements to the output. Added labels, each function has the cycle counters reset, and branch targets are calculated.

As a bit of an experiment I wrote a tiny bit of a simulator - just enough to simulate all the instructions in isqrt().

Simulation of calculating an approximation to iqsrt(9) (i.e. 1/3):

 000000: mov.l   r2,#0x0000       r2 <- 00000000 0.000000
 000004: movt.l  r2,#0x3f00       r2 <- 3f000000 0.500000
 000008: mov.l   r1,#0x59df       r1 <- 000059df 0.000000
 00000c: fmul.s  r2,r0,r2         r2 <- 40900000 4.500000
 00000e: movt.l  r1,#0x5f37       r1 <- 5f3759df 13211836172961055000.000000
 000012: asr.s   r0,r0,#0x0001    r0 <- 20880000  41100000
 000014: sub.s   r0,r1,r0         r0 <- 3eaf59df
 000016: mov.l   r1,#0x0000       r1 <- 00000000 0.000000
 00001a: movt.l  r1,#0x3fc0       r1 <- 3fc00000 1.500000
 00001e: fmul.s  r2,r2,r0         r2 <- 3fc5451b 1.541171
 000020: fmsub.s r1,r2,r0         r1 <- 3f78e082 0.972176
 000022: fmul.s  r0,r1,r0         r0 <- 3eaa78d8 0.332953
 000024: jr.l    r14

But it was just using the string names of the instructions in a switch statement and was a bit bulky so I started looking into ways of making it easier to write and ended up falling down a pretty deep rabbit hole before I decided I don't really want to write a simulator anyway (well, probably not).

One thing I was looking at was including the instruction operation in the instruction definition file directly, so i started playing with an expression parser. I came up with a pretty novel (or perhaps, just shit) non-recursive parser implemented using a hand-coded state machine and a few stacks but it wasn't anything more than a bit of piss farting about.

But this playing with an expression parser got me thinking about a programmers calculator. I mostly fire up a random xterm and run gdb whenever I want to do some sort of calculation (going by ps i currently have 9 littered across 4 virtual desktops amongst 38 xterms and 8 copies of emacs) but although that serves most of my needs very well sometimes it just doesn't. Sometimes I need to write little C or java snippets or resort to an old Sharp calculator.

Today mostly out of curiosity I had a look at some compiler generator tools - i found that bison has a Java output which although it doesn't seem to be actively developed appears to function ok. I started with my own lexical analyser but that quickly got messy so I tried jflex which did the job fine. These are the sort of tools I play with out of curiosity every few years but never do anything useful with - i think they're kinda nifty but never seem to have a real need for them.

gdb also has has a command line. Thus deeper down the rabbit hole I went looking for a readline equivalent for Java. I looked at one but it had a few external dependencies and uses maven to resolve them (which means: just no). So ... I mucked about for a couple of hours writing my own. Using stty to set the terminal to raw mode and then creating a stream which decodes the escape sequences. Of course I've forgotten everything i did with zvt (gnome-terminal 1.0) but it didn't take long to get a single-line editor going with basic functions like navigation, editing, and history. But probably it may as well just have it's own window so that was mostly just a bit of pointless mucking about and I probably should've just been playing with doing it with a gui toolkit.

Then the weekend ended.

I dunno, maybe I'll keep playing around with it, or maybe I wont.

At least I finally pruned the roses and re-trained some of them onto stakes. Kinda been letting them go a bit. Did a bit of other gardening stuff too - it turned out to be an ok enough day with a bit of sunshine and a little warmth although it didn't last long.

instruction matching

This was an interesting little diversion.

One of the requirements of a disassembler or code translator is to work out from the machine code what instruction is at a given address. Most instruction sets are variable in size so it has to determine that as well.

Depending on how the instruction set was designed this can either be a simple table lookup, ... or get somewhat more involved. It usually can't just be all a simple lookup though as there are usually some instructions that want to use most of the bits for data.

Linear

The current implementation in ezetool uses a simple linear search. For each instruction it sees if all the selector bits for the instruction match the test bits. This is trivial:

  boolean match = (select_mask & opcode) == select_bits;

It has to be executed up to two times because it doesn't know the instruction size yet. Bit 3 has that information for many instructions but not all.

Linear split

An obvious improvement that I didn't have time for initially is to split the search into two separate lists. One for 16-bit instructions and one for 32-bit instructions. Because it just Has To Be, all 32-bit instructions will be different in their first 16-bits to all 16-bit instructions so the lists can be separated.

This amounts to a pre-indexing of the instructions based on their size and lead to over 100% performance increase.

List of Hash Tables

A hashtable can't be used directly because you don't know in advance which of the bits are significant.

This can be shown by displaying the instructions which use the same selector bits as i'm using them. Some of the 'selector' bits here are separating instructions into different addressing modes which could be handled in a different way (the high-bits of the ldr and mov instructions) but this is the way i've written it so far.

 0000000f: b b  (16/32 bit variants)
 0000001f: ldr str ldr str ldr str mov lsr lsl asr bitr
 0000007f: add sub add sub add sub and orr eor asr lsr lsl fadd fsub fmul fmadd fmsub
 0000030f: mov
 000003ff: float fix fabs movts movfs jr jalr gie gid nop idle bkpt mkpt sync rti wand trap
 000f001f: lsr lsl asr bitr
 000f007f: add sub and orr eor asr lsr lsl fadd fsub fmul fmadd fmsub
 000f030f: mov
 000f03ff: float fix fabs movts movfs jr jalr
 0200001f: ldr str ldr str
 0060001f: ldr str testset ldr str
 1000001f: mov movt

A solution here would perform a linear search across all select-bit combinations, and each of those would be accessed via a hash table. Given the simplicity of the comparison test though it may as well just be a linear search.

I didn't try implementing this but as it removes the smask de-reference outside of the inner loop it may be ok.

Radix/index M-tree

Looking at the output above it is clear that at least 0x0f is used as a selector bit in every instruction. This can be used to create a first-level index and reduce the search space.

Indexing by the first nybble:

  0 [ 1]: b
  1 [ 2]: ldr str
  2 [15]: mov movts movfs jr jalr gie gid nop idle bkpt mkpt sync rti wand trap
  3 [ 3]: mov add sub
  4 [ 2]: ldr str
  5 [ 2]: ldr str
  6 [ 2]: lsr lsl
  7 [ 8]: fadd fsub fmul fmadd fmsub float fix fabs
  8 [ 1]: b
  9 [ 3]: ldr str testset
  a [ 8]: add sub and orr eor asr lsr lsl
  b [ 4]: mov movt add sub
  c [ 4]: ldr str ldr str
  d [ 2]: ldr str
  e [ 2]: asr bitr
  f [25]: lsr lsl asr bitr add sub and orr eor asr lsr lsl fadd fsub fmul fmadd
          fmsub float fix fabs mov movts movfs jr jalr

Well, it's simple ... but not very effective.

I did some analysis of the longer sets above and found most instructions use either 0x70 or 0xf0 as selector bits so a further level of m-tree can be added for those. For the others I just dump them into a linear search.

This reduces the worst-case to:

  f:   lsr lsl asr bitr mov
    0:  eor fadd movts
    1:  add fsub movfs
    2:  lsl fmul
    3:  sub fmadd
    4:  lsr fmsub jr
    5:  and float jalr
    6:  asr fix
    7:  orr fabs

Which involves: a direct radix-index based on the first 4 bits, a 2 or 3 element linear search from a 3-bit radix, and a 5-element linear search across the 'leftovers'. This turned out to be very fast - about 6x faster than the linear search, but did require a bit of human input for the tree sizes.

Radix/sparse tree

I'm not really sure what to call this but i guess its a sort of radix search but with a sparse tree. I was seeing if i could fully automate the tree building.

Each significant bit is indexed from the lsb upwards. Each tree node has a list of child nodes which specify which bit and bit-value they correspond to. The first 4 levels of the tree are fully filled but as the selector bits change it becomes a sparse tree.

My initial naive thought was that this could find a solution in one pass like a huffman code but of course this isn't the case: it still has to perform a fairly wide search because, again, it doesn't know which bits are significant (if it did, then it would work in one pass).

I implemented this as a 4-bit radix (i.e. index) into 16 separate trees. It was faster than a linear search but not as fast as the split-linear. I didn't think it was worth the effort to try to optimise the tree so that it would resemble the indexed m-tree.

8-bit index

So at this point I had a pretty good/quick implementation but wondered if i could get any better.

I tried using 8 bits for the first-stage index rather than 4. This complicates matters a little bit because many (most?) instructions don't use the first 8-bits as a selector which means they will alias to multiple locations. The solution: just alias them. So for example 'b' uses only 4 bits as a selector so one ends up with 16 copies.

Here's a part of the table.

   0: b
   1: ldr
   2: mov movts
   3: mov
   4: ldr
   5: ldr
   6: lsr
   7: fadd
   8: b
   9: ldr testset
  10: eor
  11: mov movt
  12: ldr ldr
  13: ldr
  14: asr
  15: lsr asr eor fadd mov movts

The worst case (over the whole table) is a single 8-bit indexed lookup followed by 6-element linear search.

Simple code, needs moderate space, and runs really fast ... well most of the time. At least in Java it has some strange cache-related effects so depending on the memory layout its runtime varies by nearly 100%.

Since most instructions don't use all 8-bits as a selector i also tried using 7 or 6 bits. For 7 bits the maximum run is still 6: i.e. well wasn't using 8 silly but with the half the index size. For 6-bits a couple of the runs got slightly longer but it takes half of the index size again.

Micro-Optimisations

I also looked at a bunch of micro-optimisations to the data-structures.

For the linear search, rather than iterating through a list of objects which require a dereference, iterate through a single array of integers which contain the selector mask and bits together. This could be applied anywhere a linear search is although other cases also need to include the instruction index.

Very slight improvement - Java seems good at object dereferences but it might be applicable to c.

I also tried flattening one of the array of lists implementations into a single list of integers. The first N elements are just indices into the array and then the structure at each array is a count followed by { mask, value, index } triplets. Well Java didn't really like this so it wasn't an improvement.

Numbers

I realised all implementations require two lookups so I did timed that. I didn't bother timing the ones which weren't competitive for a single lookup pass.

This is for 100 000 iterations of looking up every instruction in order (84 using my splits). So even the slowest implementation is only ~~120ns~~ 18ns in Java on a Kaveri CPU. In all cases any lists required during building were collapsed to arrays of exactly the right size - arrays are much smaller than lists and iterate faster.

  time    memory               alg
  1.013                     0  linear search
  0.449                     2  linear split search
  0.157   (2+64*2)*2+84   344  0x3f index + linear search
  0.153   (2+128*2)*2+84  600  0x7f index + linear search
  0.180   6*(2+6)+72+84   204  multi-stage radix + linear search

The memory is the approximate extra words required to store the indices. An array is counted as 2 words + space for the contents (length+pointer+data). The multi-stage thing needs the bit number/mask and two arrays and I might have an error there.

Based on that I would probably go with the 0x3f indexed version. The building of the indices is easier than the multi-stage radix algorithm and it doesn't require an additional object (it just uses a 2d array) and memory requirements are modest compared to the 0x7f version with much the same runtime.

Still, it's only about 2.8x faster which is surprising given that the search is an order of magnitude less work, between 0 and 9 linear steps compared to 84 (or on average 4.5 vs 42). The benchmark is probably just not a good one.

Addendum

So there is a very cheap way to determine if the instruction is 16-bits or 32-bits. The first nybble is enough to determine this - i vaguely recall something like that but for some reason I thought it required a bigger table.

boolean isShortInstruction(int opcode) {
   return ((0x44ff >> (opcode&0x0f)) & 1) == 1;
}

I added it and re-ran the benchmarks. It makes a measurable but pretty insignificant difference to the indexed implementations. The lookup is already fast enough that loop overheads and other scaffolding must be the dominating factor.

The linear search gained a lot because for a 32-bit instruction all 16-bit instructions had to be scanned before you could determine it wasn't one of them.

  time    memory               alg
  1.013                     0  linear search (original)
  0.296                     2  split linear split search
  0.156   (2+64*2)*2+84   344  split 0x3f index + linear search
  0.149   (2+128*2)*2+84  600  split 0x7f index + linear search

TBH the linear search is fast for the purposes of a command-line tool but I rolled these improvements into the implementation anyway.

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