[cfe-dev] RFC: ODR checker for Clang and LLD

[Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev]

Hi all,

I'd like to propose an ODR checker feature for Clang and LLD. The feature
would be similar to gold's --detect-odr-violations feature, but better: we
can rely on integration with clang to avoid relying on debug info and to
perform more precise matching.

The basic idea is that we use clang's ability to create ODR hashes for
declarations. ODR hashes are computed using all information about a
declaration that is ODR-relevant. If the flag -fdetect-odr-violations is
passed, Clang will store the ODR hashes in a so-called ODR table in each
object file. Each ODR table will contain a mapping from mangled declaration
names to ODR hashes. At link time, the linker will read the ODR table and
report any mismatches.

To make this work:
- LLVM will be extended with the ability to represent ODR tables in the IR
and emit them to object files
- Clang will be extended with the ability to emit ODR tables using ODR
hashes
- LLD will be extended to read ODR tables from object files

I have implemented a prototype of this feature. It is available here:
https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/odr-checker and some results from
applying it to chromium are here: crbug.com/726071
As you can see it did indeed find a number of real ODR violations in
Chromium, including some that wouldn't be detectable using debug info.

If you're interested in what the format of the ODR table would look like,
that prototype shows pretty much what I had in mind, but I expect many
other aspects of the implementation to change as it is upstreamed.

Thanks,
-- 
-- 
Peter
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