So, Anton got some useful code working that I could patch into a MySQL server for testing purposes – a POWER8 optimized CRC32 implementation.

I went with a pretty stock MySQL 5.6.22 (one patch) with sysbench preparing a single 2GB table (10,000,000 rows). I then hacked up innochecksum so that it would only do the correct CRC32 (rather than trying each checksum type). Using the standard CRC32 algorithm it took around three seconds to verify all of the checksums. With a POWER8 optimized CRC32: 0.4-0.5 seconds. Useful speed-up!

I then ran sysbench read/write with 16 threads with oltp-table-size=10000 (on the larger table) to see if there would be an improvement in a “real world” workload. I got about 30% better performance on read/write operations!

Using perf to see where CPU was going, CPU time spent doing CRC32 calculations went down from …

In C (and C++) you can specify that a variable should take a specific number of bits of storage by doing “uint32_t foo:4;” rather than just “uint32_t foo”. In this example, the former uses 4 bits while the latter uses 32bits. This can be useful to pack many bit fields together.

Or, that’s what they’d like you to think.

In reality, the C spec allows the compiler to do just about anything it wants with these bitfields – which usually means it’s something you didn’t expect.

For a start, in a struct -e.g. “struct foo { uint32_t foo:4; uint32_t blah; uint32_t blergh:20; }” the compiler could go and combine foo and blergh into a single uint32_t and place it somewhere… or it could not. In this case, sizeof(struct foo) isn’t defined and may vary based on compiler, platform, compiler version, phases of the moon or if you’ve washed your hands recently.

Where …