Crate safe_arch

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Expand description

A crate that safely exposes arch intrinsics via #[cfg()].

safe_arch lets you safely use CPU intrinsics. Those things in the core::arch modules. It works purely via #[cfg()] and compile time CPU feature declaration. If you want to check for a feature at runtime and then call an intrinsic or use a fallback path based on that then this crate is sadly not for you.

SIMD register types are “newtype’d” so that better trait impls can be given to them, but the inner value is a pub field so feel free to just grab it out if you need to. Trait impls of the newtypes include: Default (zeroed), From/Into of appropriate data types, and appropriate operator overloading.

  • Most intrinsics (like addition and multiplication) are totally safe to use as long as the CPU feature is available. In this case, what you get is 1:1 with the actual intrinsic.
  • Some intrinsics take a pointer of an assumed minimum alignment and validity span. For these, the safe_arch function takes a reference of an appropriate type to uphold safety.
    • Try the bytemuck crate (and turn on the bytemuck feature of this crate) if you want help safely casting between reference types.
  • Some intrinsics are not safe unless you’re very careful about how you use them, such as the streaming operations requiring you to use them in combination with an appropriate memory fence. Those operations aren’t exposed here.
  • Some intrinsics mess with the processor state, such as changing the floating point flags, saving and loading special register state, and so on. LLVM doesn’t really support you messing with that within a high level language, so those operations aren’t exposed here. Use assembly or something if you want to do that.

Naming Conventions

The safe_arch crate does not simply use the “official” names for each intrinsic, because the official names are generally poor. Instead, the operations have been given better names that makes things hopefully easier to understand then you’re reading the code.

For a full explanation of the naming used, see the Naming Conventions page.

Current Support

  • x86 / x86_64 (Intel, AMD, etc)
    • 128-bit: sse, sse2, sse3, ssse3, sse4.1, sse4.2
    • 256-bit: avx, avx2
    • Other: adx, aes, bmi1, bmi2, fma, lzcnt, pclmulqdq, popcnt, rdrand, rdseed

Compile Time CPU Target Features

At the time of me writing this, Rust enables the sse and sse2 CPU features by default for all i686 (x86) and x86_64 builds. Those CPU features are built into the design of x86_64, and you’d need a super old x86 CPU for it to not support at least sse and sse2, so they’re a safe bet for the language to enable all the time. In fact, because the standard library is compiled with them enabled, simply trying to disable those features would actually cause ABI issues and fill your program with UB (link).

If you want additional CPU features available at compile time you’ll have to enable them with an additional arg to rustc. For a feature named name you pass -C target-feature=+name, such as -C target-feature=+sse3 for sse3.

You can alternately enable all target features of the current CPU with -C target-cpu=native. This is primarily of use if you’re building a program you’ll only run on your own system.

It’s sometimes hard to know if your target platform will support a given feature set, but the Steam Hardware Survey is generally taken as a guide to what you can expect people to have available. If you click “Other Settings” it’ll expand into a list of CPU target features and how common they are. These days, it seems that sse3 can be safely assumed, and ssse3, sse4.1, and sse4.2 are pretty safe bets as well. The stuff above 128-bit isn’t as common yet, give it another few years.

Please note that executing a program on a CPU that doesn’t support the target features it was compiles for is Undefined Behavior.

Currently, Rust doesn’t actually support an easy way for you to check that a feature enabled at compile time is actually available at runtime. There is the “feature_detected” family of macros, but if you enable a feature they will evaluate to a constant true instead of actually deferring the check for the feature to runtime. This means that, if you did want a check at the start of your program, to confirm that all the assumed features are present and error out when the assumptions don’t hold, you can’t use that macro. You gotta use CPUID and check manually. rip. Hopefully we can make that process easier in a future version of this crate.

A Note On Working With Cfg

There’s two main ways to use cfg:

  • Via an attribute placed on an item, block, or expression:
    • #[cfg(debug_assertions)] println!("hello");
  • Via a macro used within an expression position:
    • if cfg!(debug_assertions) { println!("hello"); }

The difference might seem small but it’s actually very important:

  • The attribute form will include code or not before deciding if all the items named and so forth really exist or not. This means that code that is configured via attribute can safely name things that don’t always exist as long as the things they name do exist whenever that code is configured into the build.
  • The macro form will include the configured code no matter what, and then the macro resolves to a constant true or false and the compiler uses dead code elimination to cut out the path not taken.

This crate uses cfg via the attribute, so the functions it exposes don’t exist at all when the appropriate CPU target features aren’t enabled. Accordingly, if you plan to call this crate or not depending on what features are enabled in the build you’ll also need to control your use of this crate via cfg attribute, not cfg macro.

Modules

Macros

Structs

  • m128
    The data for a 128-bit SSE register of four f32 lanes.
  • m128d
    The data for a 128-bit SSE register of two f64 values.
  • m128i
    The data for a 128-bit SSE register of integer data.
  • m256
    The data for a 256-bit AVX register of eight f32 lanes.
  • m256d
    The data for a 256-bit AVX register of four f64 values.
  • m256i
    The data for a 256-bit AVX register of integer data.

Functions