[LLVMdev] llvm DSA - reproduce the result in PLDI 07 paper

[John Criswell]

Dear Zhiyuan,

In order to reproduce the results from the paper, you'll need to 
replicate a system from that era.  You'll need to use the same version 
of LLVM and DSA that the paper used.  I think that was LLVM 1.9 (the 
release_19 branch of LLVM and poolalloc), but I'm not sure.  You should 
check to see if the paper specifies the version.

As you'll be using a very old version of LLVM, it may be worth setting 
up a VM with a corresponding old version of Linux.  I suspect newer 
compilers will not compile a version of LLVM that is that old, so using 
an old version of Linux with an old version of GCC may be needed.  I 
think Fedora Core 2 is the OS we were using at the time.

To answer the question of why you can't use a modern version of LLVM and 
poolalloc, it's because LLVM has changed significantly. DSA relies upon 
the type annotations provided in the LLVM IR to "bootstrap" its type 
inference (bootstrap is not quite the right word, but it's the closest 
one of which I could think).  As LLVM matured, transformations would 
ditch the type information (e.g., transforming typed GEPs into untyped 
GEPs into a byte array), making DSA's ability to do type-inference (and 
thereby improving field sensitivity) more difficult.  Throw into the mix 
the fact that DSA is maintained by an academic research group, and the 
result is that modern DSA doesn't have the accuracy that the original 
DSA did.

The good news is that I think DSA can be fixed by making its 
type-inferencing code smarter.  The bad news is that it'd be a fair 
amount of work to do.  So far, no one has had sufficient 
desire/motivation to design and implement the improvements.

Regards,

John Criswell


On 4/6/15 4:56 PM, Wan Zhiyuan wrote:
> Dear all,
> I am trying to reproduce the "Percent May Alias" result described in 
> PLDI 07's paper "Making Context-Sensitive Points-to Analysis with Heap 
> Cloning Practical For The Real World" 
> (http://llvm.org/pubs/2007-06-10-PLDI-DSA.html).
>
> However, my "Percent May Alias" for all the benchmarks is much 
> greater, especially "bzip2".
>
> The DSA code I use is from "https://github.com/smackers/smack". I have 
> diff the code between smack and poolalloc_32. They are almost the same 
> except the "#include" statements.
>
> I was wondering whether I need to do some configuration to make DSA 
> work properly.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Zhiyuan
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
John Criswell
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/criswell

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