[RFC PATCH] crypto: riscv: scalar accelerated GHASH

[Qingfang Deng]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 10:15 PM Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org> wrote:
> > - There’s no clean way to force the optimized path - GCC only emits
> > fast unaligned loads if tuned for a specific CPU (e.g., -mtune=size or
> > -mtune=thead-c906), which the kernel doesn't typically do, even with
> > HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS.
> >
> > Maybe we should raise this with the GCC maintainers. An explicit
> > option to enable optimized unaligned access could help.
> >
>
> HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS is a build time setting, so the
> resulting kernel only runs correctly on hardware that implements
> unaligned accesses in hardware.
>
> So that means you could pass this -mtune= option too in that case, no?

GCC docs say -mtune=size is internal to -Os and not meant for direct
use. So while it enables optimized unaligned access, relying on it
feels a bit hacky.
Clang is more explicit here: -mno-strict-align cleanly enables
optimized unaligned accesses. It'd be great if GCC had something
similar..

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-14.2.0/gcc/RISC-V-Options.html#index-mtune-12

> Then, you can just use a packed struct or an __aligned(1) annotation
> and the compiler will emit the correct code for you, depending on
> whether unaligned accesses are permitted.