Potential speed improvements for SHA512 via BMI2 instructions

まず sha2/src/sha512/x86_avx2.rs と、参照されている core_arch x86_64 BMI2 実装を確認し、利用可能な命令サポートを判断します。比較可能な x64 システムで issue の sha2 ベンチマークコマンドを実行し、引用されている実装と結果を比較します。BMI2 サポートの実現可能性と SHA512 のパフォーマンスへの測定可能な影響が確立されれば完了です。

I recently looked into the sha2 crate performance, specifically for performing many consecutive SHA512 calculations on modern x64 processors which do not yet have the brand-new SHA512 instructions mentioned in #634.

As documented in https://github.com/RustCrypto/asm-hashes/issues/83 and https://github.com/RustCrypto/asm-hashes/issues/82, the now-deprecated asm feature target of sha2 0.10.x is slower than the native AVX2 enabled native Rust with intrinsics. Upon closer inspection, this makes sense since the chosen asm code doesn't use AVX or other newer CPU technologies at all.

In comparison with other implementations such as libgcrypt's which have specially optimized asm code like sha512-avx2-bmi2-amd64.S, those are roughly ~25% faster for SHA512 than the sha2 crate in quick benchmarks.

• Tested on AMD Zen3 Ryzen 5950X under Linux
• RUSTFLAGS='-C target-cpu=native' cargo +nightly bench -p sha2 has test sha512_10000 [...] = 894 MB/s
• libgcrypt tests/bench-slope --repetitions 10000 shows 1084 MiB/s
• The benchmark harnesses may not be fully comparable and have different units, this is just some quick testing to get the relevant ballpark numbers (!)

Another well-known project with this optimization level is the Linux kernel, see arch/x86/crypto/sha512-avx2-asm.S.

Based on observations made as part of https://github.com/RustCrypto/asm-hashes/issues/83 , a potential explanation for this is that the current native optimized Rust code in sha2/src/sha512/x86_avx2.rs uses AVX2, but not BMI2. For the assembler implementations, the BMI2 instruction RORX made a significant performance difference. Also, the terminology is a bit fuzzy here. Since BMI2 seems to be present on all common processors that have AVX2, it's sometimes mentioned as belonging to AVX2, but is technically separate, see Wikipedia.

The bmi2 target feature was around for a while since https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/30462 . I'm not an expert on Rust intrinsics, but the RORX instruction seems to be missing from the current core_arch/src/x86_64/bmi2.rs instructions implemented by core::arch::x86_64?
If the instruction itself isn't available, that may be a major roadblock to using it in sha2 for SHA512. I'm not sure of the exact backstory here, but https://github.com/gnzlbg/bitintr/issues/2 seems to hint at the lack of RORX and other similar instruction availability since 2017, so it doesn't look like a regression.

To summarize, I suspect that once there is support for this particular BMI2 CPU instruction, it may be possible to squeeze additional SHA512 performance out of existing CPUs.
Notably, this does not rely on the more recent AVX512 instruction set or VSHA512 instruction set. It also probably won't be relevant for SHA1/SHA256 where faster mechanisms are commonly available and in use by sha2 on most modern CPUs.