8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Robert NurnbergandJoost VandeVondele 48a9118251 Minor cleanups June 2026
In the spirit of previous such PRs, this PR proposes a collection of nonfunctional changes.

I am happy to incorporate changes from other devs, and revert some of the proposed changes if the maintainers ask me to.

Apart from trivial changes, the proposed changes so far include:

* A requested edit to `AUTHORS` and a resorting of all entries, following DIN 5007 for the treatment of any special characters.
* Exclude the two recent integer type renaming commits from git blame.
* Tightening of some static asserts in `history.h` to avoid overflows. (Note that rounding errors for floating point types could lead to the assert in `operator<<` triggering at run-time.)
* Re-instate the 0.5s maximal thinking time in case of a single legal move and reword the comment to make it clear that it should not be tuned.
* ~~A small refactoring of the network loading code thanks to @dubslow.~~
* A refactoring of the "dtz is dtm" code, also thanks to @dubslow.

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6928

No functional change
2026-07-10 20:12:38 +02:00
DisservinandJoost VandeVondele dd3e1c4a50 Consistent Integer Types
example of using, to avoid mixed usage of std::uint/std::int and uint/int...
```cpp
using u64 = std::uint64_t;
using u32 = std::uint32_t;
using u16 = std::uint16_t;
using u8  = std::uint8_t;

using i64 = std::int64_t;
using i32 = std::int32_t;
using i16 = std::int16_t;
using i8  = std::int8_t;

using usize = std::size_t;
using isize = std::ptrdiff_t;

#if defined(__GNUC__) && defined(IS_64BIT)
__extension__ using u128 = unsigned __int128;
__extension__ using i128 = signed __int128;
#endif
```

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6874

No functional change
2026-06-08 19:54:33 +02:00
DisservinandJoost VandeVondele 1018879fe1 Fix clang-format complaints
Somehow we forgot to add shm.h & shm_linux.h to the list of headers to be
formatted.

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6591

No functional change
2026-02-04 17:34:11 +01:00
anematodeandDisservin 253aaefbc0 Fix compilation on BSD/macOS
fixes github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/6571

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6572

No functional change
2026-01-28 20:28:27 +01:00
anematodeandJoost VandeVondele c0f245303b Make PGO builds deterministic again
some environment dependent execution (e.g. pid) were being std::hash'ed, and
net filenames put in unordered maps.  Also uses sprintf instead of
std::to_string.  Depending on precise content, this could lead to different
PGO'ed binaries. This is mitigated by using a basic hash function.

This also fixes a potential issue in net filename generation, in cases where
std::hash would use invocation dependent salt, which is not the cases today for
typical std libraries.

Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6562

No functional change
2026-01-22 19:15:17 +01:00
Joost VandeVondele 28844fc697 Update of the year
Happy New Year!

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6514

No functional change
2026-01-01 16:17:38 +01:00
Joost VandeVondele 4b8fffe3b3 Silence warning
for systems without shared memory support

Fixes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/6425

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6426

No functional change
2025-11-17 13:36:11 +01:00
69a01b88f3 Use shared memory for network weights
This enables different Stockfish processes that use the same weights to use the
same memory. The approach establishes equivalence by memory content, and is
compatible with NUMA replication.  The benefit of sharing is reduced memory usage
and a speedup thanks to improved (inter-process) caching of the network in the
CPUs cache, and thus reduced bandwidth usage to main memory. Even though this
change doesn't benefit a user running a single process, this helps on fishtest
or e.g.  for Lichess, when multiple games run concurrently, or multiple
positions are analyzed in parallel.

This concept was probably first introduced in the Monty engine
(https://github.com/official-monty/Monty/pull/62), after a discussion in
https://github.com/official-stockfish/fishtest/issues/2077 on the issue of
memory pressure. Measurements based on Torch
(https://github.com/user-attachments/files/21386224/verbatim.pdf) further
suggested that large gains were possible. Multiple other engines have
adopted this 'verbatim' format as well.

The implementation here adds the flexibility needed for SF, for example, retains
the ability to bundle compressed networks with the binary, to load nets by uci
option, and to distribute the shared nets to the proper NUMA region. This
flexibility comes with a fair amount of complexity in the implementation, such
as OS specific code, and fallback code.

For most users this should be transparent. However, for example, those running
docker containers should ensure the `--ipc` flag is set correctly, and
`--shm-size` is sufficiently large.

The benefits of this patch significantly depend on hardware, with systems with
many cores and a large (O(150MB), the net size) L3 cache benefitting typically
most.  On such systems SF speedups (as measured via nps playing games with
large concurrency but just 1 thread) can be 38%, which results in master vs.
patch Elo which gains about 25 Elo.

```
   # PLAYER             :  RATING  ERROR   POINTS  PLAYED   (%)
   1 shared_memoryPR    :    24.8    1.9  39432.0   73728    53
   2 master             :     0.0   ----  34296.0   73728    47
```

In a multithreaded setup, where weights are already shared, that benefit is smaller,
for example on the same HW as above, but with 8t for each side.
```
   # PLAYER             :  RATING  ERROR  POINTS  PLAYED   (%)
   1 shared_memoryPR    :     5.2    3.5  9351.0   18432    51
   2 master             :     0.0   ----  9081.0   18432    49
```

On fishtest with a typical hardware mix of our contributors, the following was measured:

STC, 60k games
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/69074a49ea4b268f1fac236c
Elo: 4.69 ± 1.4 (95%) LOS: 100.0%
Total: 60000 W: 16085 L: 15275 D: 28640
Ptnml(0-2): 154, 6440, 16053, 7148, 205
nElo: 9.38 ± 2.8 (95%) PairsRatio: 1.12

To verify correctness with a single process on a NUMA architecture,
speedtest was used, confirming near equivalence:
```
master:        Average (over 10):  296236186
shared_memory: Average (over 10):  295769332
```
Currently, using large pages for the shared network weights is not always possible,
which can lead to a small slowdown (1-2%), in case a single process is run.

closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6173

No functional change

Co-authored-by: disservin <disservin.social@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Joost VandeVondele <Joost.VandeVondele@gmail.com>
2025-11-02 16:04:09 +01:00