[all-commits] [llvm/llvm-project] 1f6ec3: [LangRef] Update memory access ops to raise UB if ...

Juneyoung Lee via All-commits all-commits at lists.llvm.org
Fri Feb 12 21:14:07 PST 2021


  Branch: refs/heads/main
  Home:   https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
  Commit: 1f6ec3d08f75dba6c93c291bd92552b807736eb3
      https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/1f6ec3d08f75dba6c93c291bd92552b807736eb3
  Author: Juneyoung Lee <aqjune at gmail.com>
  Date:   2021-02-13 (Sat, 13 Feb 2021)

  Changed paths:
    M llvm/docs/LangRef.rst

  Log Message:
  -----------
  [LangRef] Update memory access ops to raise UB if ptrs are not well defined

In the past, it was stated in D87994 that it is allowed to dereference a pointer that is partially undefined
if all of its possible representations fit into a dereferenceable range.
The motivation of the direction was to make a range analysis helpful for assuring dereferenceability.
Even if a range analysis concludes that its offset is within bounds, the offset could still be partially undefined; to utilize the range analysis, this relaxation was necessary.
https://groups.google.com/g/llvm-dev/c/2Qk4fOHUoAE/m/KcvYMEgOAgAJ has more context about this.

However, this is currently blocking another optimization, which is annotating the noundef attribute for library functions' arguments. D95122 is the patch.
Currently, there are quite a few library functions which cannot have noundef attached to its pointer argument because it can be transformed from load/store.
For example, MemCpyOpt can convert stores into memset:

```
store p, i32 0
store (p+1), i32 0 // Since currently it is allowed for store to have partially undefined pointer..
->
memset(p, 0, 8)    // memset cannot guarantee that its ptr argument is noundef.
```

A bigger problem is that this makes unclear which library functions are allowed to have 'noundef' and which functions aren't (e.g., strlen).
This makes annotating noundef almost impossible for this kind of functions.

This patch proposes that all memory operations should have well-defined pointers.
For memset/memcpy, it is semantically equivalent to running a loop until the size is met (and branching on undef is UB), so the size is also updated to be well-defined.

Strictly speaking, this again violates the implication of dereferenceability from range analysis result.
However, I think this is okay for the following reasons:

1. It seems the existing analyses in the LLVM main repo does not have conflicting implementation with the new proposal.
`isDereferenceableAndAlignedPointer` works only when the GEP offset is constant, and `isDereferenceableAndAlignedInLoop` is also fine.

2. A possible miscompilation happens only when the source has a pointer with a *partially* undefined offset (it's okay with poison because there is no 'partially poison' value).
But, at least I'm not aware of a language using LLVM as backend that has a well-defined program while allowing partially undefined pointers.
There might be such a language that I'm not aware of, but improving the performance of the mainstream languages like C and Rust is more important IMHO.

Reviewed By: jdoerfert

Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D95238




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