At Google we fuzz zstd without ZSTD_MULTITHREAD but we want inputs to be as much as reproducible. It allows us to test new fuzzing methods for our fuzz team internally and have more horsepower to find bugs
We found that movemask is not used properly or consumes too much CPU.
This effort helps to optimize the movemask emulation on ARM.
For level 8-9 we saw 3-5% improvements. For level 10 we say 1.5%
improvement.
The key idea is not to use pure movemasks but to have groups of bits.
For rowEntries == 16, 32 we are going to have groups of size 4 and 2
respectively. It means that each bit will be duplicated within the group
Then we do AND to have only one bit set in the group so that iteration
with lowering bit `a &= (a - 1)` works as well.
Also, aarch64 does not have rotate instructions for 16 bit, only for 32
and 64, that's why we see more improvements for level 8-9.
vshrn_n_u16 instruction is used to achieve that: vshrn_n_u16 shifts by
4 every u16 and narrows to 8 lower bits. See the picture below. It's
also used in
[Folly](https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/c5702590080aa5d0e8d666d91861d64634065132/folly/container/detail/F14Table.h#L446).
It also uses 2 cycles according to Neoverse-N{1,2} guidelines.
64 bit movemask is already well optimized. We have ongoing experiments
but were not able to validate other implementations work reliably faster.
