[LLVMdev] Annotating known pointer alignment

[Duncan Sands]

Hi Clemens,

> I'm instrumenting IR by replacing loads and stores by calls to a library, which
> I have compiled to bitcode such that inlining can take place. My problem is: If
> I could retain the alignment information on the load/store, this would open many
> optimization opportunities after inlining. Unfortunately, I don't know how.
>
> After thinking about it, and trying different things, I now have several questions.
>
> First, consider this function:
>    #include <stdint.h>
>    uint64_t foo(uint64_t *bar) {
>      *bar = 42;
>      return (uint64_t)bar & 3;
>    }
>
> Which is compiled to
>    define i64 @foo(i64* %bar) nounwind uwtable ssp {
>      store i64 42, i64* %bar, align 8
>      %0 = ptrtoint i64* %bar to i64
>      %and = and i64 %0, 3
>      ret i64 %and
>    }
>
> 1) How can clang deduce the alignment on the store?

by consulting the C standard :)

  It emits a store without
> alignment information,

I assume you mean: without an explicit alignment.

  and instcombine adds the explicit alignment according to
> the langref (pref alignment).

Without an explicit alignment means the ABI alignment in the case of
loads/stores.

> 2) If we know that the store is aligned, shouldn't instcombine deduce that the
> pointer %bar itself must be aligned (set low bits in KnownZero), and use this
> information for other uses, at least those that are dominated by the store? This
> would fold the three instructions to "ret i64 0".

Probably it should.  Doing so would require that LLVM semantics considers an
unaligned load/store to result in undefined behaviour, and would need to be
documented in the LangRef.

Ciao, Duncan.

> 3) If instcombine cannot deduce it, is there a way to annotate that a specific
> pointer value is aligned? In my case it should work to add this sequence:
>    %A = ptrtoint i64* %ptr to i64
>    %B = and i64 %A, -8
>    %C = inttoptr i64 %B to i64*
> and replacing all uses of %ptr by %C, then running optimizations, and then
> replacing %C by %ptr again. But this is neither efficient nor nice, and
> optimizations could cause other instructions to use my dummy instructions too
> such that I cannot remove them afterwards.
> Nick Lewycky once proposed to add an alignment field to ptrtoint (for bug 9120),
> following the principle that pointer uses know the alignment. That would also
> help for my example. After inlining, I could visit all uses of the pointer
> (load/store/ptrtoint) and add the alignment accordingly.
>
> Also clang could set an alignment for ptrtoint, since it seems to know that some
> pointers are always aligned.
>
> Thanks for any help to solve my problem or answer my questions!
>
> Clemens
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev