[ELF] Simplify getSectionPiece

[grimar]

I think this kills the additional optimization we have here. Unfortunately, I do not remember
how much improvement this piece had in comparison with the simple code as your patch has,
but this was the code initially implemented by Rafael in r284594, which comment says:

Add a faster binary search.

Even with the hash table cache, binary search was still pretty
hot. This can be made even faster with prefetching.

Idea from http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/

I will suggest moving this to llvm.

I do not know if that was moved to llvm (or if that what we might want atm, if not).

[MaskRay]

In D55248#1318096, @grimar wrote:

I think this kills the additional optimization we have here. Unfortunately, I do not remember
how much improvement this piece had in comparison with the simple code as your patch has,
but this was the code initially implemented by Rafael in r284594, which comment says:

Add a faster binary search.

Even with the hash table cache, binary search was still pretty
hot. This can be made even faster with prefetching.

Idea from http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/

I will suggest moving this to llvm.

I do not know if that was moved to llvm (or if that what we might want atm, if not).

The optimization is that by using a simple conditional assignment, the compilers will know to generate conditional move (branch-less binary search as the paper says)

// either one below generates conditional mov
if (Pieces[Idx + H].InputOff <= Offset)
 Idx += H;

Idx = Pieces[Idx + H].InputOff <= Offset ? Idx + H : Idx;

// but std::upper_bound doesn't

The (negligible) disadvantage of this approach is that in each iteration, it reduces the range size from n to ceil(n/2), instead of floor(n/2) as is the case of std::upper_bound (which produces the not; add instruction sequence to do size -= H+1).

But note OffsetMap.find(Offset) also takes some time. The improvement here is negligible to me..

A static -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug build of bin/clang-8:

perf stat -r 10 ~/llvm/Release/bin/ld.lld @response.txt -o /dev/null => The times vary from 4.5435 to 4.7403 with or without this optimization. The differences are purely noise.. I cannot find the (very minor) optimization (branch instruction -> conditional move) improve the linking time.

[ruiu]

Yeah, I think with an optimizing compiler you cannot see any difference between the old and the new code.

ELF/InputSection.cpp

1226–1230

Can you add llvm:: to upper_bound so that that looks obviously different from std::upper_bound?

1226–1231

Calculating a distance between two iterators to use it as an array access index seems a bit awkward.

[MaskRay]

Add llvm::

[ruiu]

LGTM

ELF/InputSection.cpp

1230

You can remove this assert as it doesn't make much sense anymore.

ELF/InputSection.cpp

SectionPiece *MergeInputSection::getSectionPiece(uint64_t Offset) {
 
   // Find a piece starting at a given offset.
   auto It = OffsetMap.find(Offset);
   if (It != OffsetMap.end())
     return &Pieces[It->second];
 
   // If Offset is not at beginning of a section piece, it is not in the map.
   // In that case we need to  do a binary search of the original section piece vector.
-  size_t Size = Pieces.size();
-  size_t Idx = 0;
-
-  while (Size != 1) {
-    size_t H = Size / 2;
-    Size -= H;
-    if (Pieces[Idx + H].InputOff <= Offset)
-      Idx += H;
-  }
-  if (Offset < Pieces[Idx].InputOff)
-    --Idx;
-  return &Pieces[Idx];
+  auto It2 =
+      llvm::upper_bound(Pieces, Offset, [](uint64_t Offset, SectionPiece P) {
+        return Offset < P.InputOff;
+      });
+  return &It2[-1];
 }
 
 // Returns the offset in an output section for a given input offset.
 // Because contents of a mergeable section is not contiguous in output,
 // it is not just an addition to a base output offset.
 uint64_t MergeInputSection::getParentOffset(uint64_t Offset) const {
   // If Offset is not at beginning of a section piece, it is not in the map.
   // In that case we need to search from the original section piece vector.
   const SectionPiece &Piece =