The mutually misaligned inputs on aarch64 are compared with a simple
byte copy, which is not very efficient. Enhance the comparison
similar to strcmp by loading a double-word at a time. The peak
performance improvement (i.e. 4k maxlen comparisons) due to this on
the strncmp microbenchmark in glibc is as follows:
falkor: 3.5x (up to 72% time reduction)
cortex-a73: 3.5x (up to 71% time reduction)
cortex-a53: 3.5x (up to 71% time reduction)
All mutually misaligned inputs from 16 bytes maxlen onwards show
upwards of 15% improvement and there is no measurable effect on the
performance of aligned/mutually aligned inputs.
Siddhesh Poyarekar