Both symbols are marked as legacy in POSIX.1-2001 and removed on
POSIX.1-2008, although the prototypes are defined for _GNU_SOURCE
or _DEFAULT_SOURCE.
GCC also replaces bcopy with a memmove and bzero with memset on default
configuration (to actually get a bzero libc call the code requires
to omit string.h inclusion and built with -fno-builtin), so it is
highly unlikely programs are actually calling libc bzero symbol.
On a recent Linux distro (Ubuntu 22.04), there is no bzero calls
by the installed binaries.
$ cat count_bstring.sh
#!/bin/bash
files=`IFS=':';for i in $PATH; do test -d "$i" && find "$i" -maxdepth 1 -executable -type f; done`
total=0
for file in $files; do
symbols=`objdump -R $file 2>&1`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
ncalls=`echo $symbols | grep -w $1 | wc -l`
((total=total+ncalls))
if [ $ncalls -gt 0 ]; then
echo "$file: $ncalls"
fi
fi
done
echo "TOTAL=$total"
$ ./count_bstring.sh bzero
TOTAL=0
Checked on x86_64-linux-gnu.
memset with zero as the value to set is by far the majority value (99%+
for Python3 and GCC).
bzero can be slightly more optimized for this case by using a zero-idiom
xor for broadcasting the set value to a register (vector or GPR).
Co-developed-by: Noah Goldstein <goldstein.w.n@gmail.com>
Since VZEROUPPER triggers RTM abort while VZEROALL won't, select AVX
optimized string/memory functions with
xtest
jz 1f
vzeroall
ret
1:
vzeroupper
ret
at function exit on processors with usable RTM, but without 256-bit EVEX
instructions to avoid VZEROUPPER inside a transactionally executing RTM
region.
