Alignment of doubles in ghc

[Simon Marlow]

=20
> I was wondering if anyone has investigated the alignment of doubles in
> ghc.
>=20
> On x86 machines, doubles can be aligned on 4 byte boundaries,=20
> but there
> is a performace improvement if they have 8 byte alignment. =20
> As far as I
> can tell, ghc uses 4 byte alignment for doubles.
>=20
> I started to look into the changes needed to go from 4 to 8 byte
> alignment...

It's quite a difficult task.  You would need to arrange that the stack
pointer and heap pointer are always 8-byte aligned, which is something
we don't do at the moment: they're always 4-byte aligned only.  This
would mean changes to the code generator to add alignment padding to
stack frames, and to pad the heap pointer to an 8-byte boundary after
each allocation.

We haven't looked into it, but you're welcome to try!

We *have* seen examples where gcc spilled some intermediate double
values to the stack, and it made a big difference whether the stack
address used was 8-byte aligned or not.  I seem to recall this was the
mysterious cause of a 40% or so difference in speed between two runs of
the same binary at different times of the day :-)

Cheers,
	Simon