[fpc-devel] State of SSE/AVX intrinsics

J. Gareth Moreton gareth at moreton-family.com
Wed Apr 22 15:05:59 CEST 2020


Whether they be new functions or just an optional parameter, I do agree 
that they should be compatible with FreeMem rather than requiring their 
own function - Microsoft's non-portable _aligned_malloc requires calling 
a specialised 'free' function, but the C11 and C++17 standards, despite 
having new functions, can use 'free' without any problems.

My impression is that the alignment of GetMem is implementation-specific 
and is fine for most applications.  On x86_64 at least, it seems to be 
at least 16 bytes, but there are some cases where you want 32 bytes 
(256-bit AVX), 64 bytes (AVX512) or 4,096 bytes (memory paging).

Gareth aka. Kit

On 22/04/2020 11:07, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 22 Apr 2020, Tomas Hajny wrote:
>
>> On 2020-04-21 20:47, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> As I mentioned in my future development post,
>>> do you think FPC could benefit from
>>> GetMemAligned and ReallocMemAligned routines?
>>> The internal functions could be used to help
>>> control such custom alignment in dynamic
>>> arrays.
>>
>> Wouldn't it be better to use either some kind of global property or 
>> an optional additional argument than completely new routines 
>> requiring explicit handling not only from the end-user programs, but 
>> also from all units which may in turn be involved in memory 
>> allocation (including various containers etc.)?
>
> I think so too.
>
> What's more, I thought the memory allocation routines already 
> guarantee some
> form of alignment, simply because of the internal structures used by 
> the memory
> manager ?
>
> Michael.
>

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