[cfe-dev] (not) initializing assembly outputs with -ftrivial-auto-var-init

Tue Mar 26 13:07:18 PDT 2019

This thread has IMO started going down an unfortunate path.

Normal compiler behavior and optimization passes (such as DSE, and
everything else) should not care WHAT is inside the assembly string, but
should just trust the asm-constraints to properly indicate the behavior of
the contained assembly. If the asm constraint says it stores a value (which
is what "=m" means), then the usual behavior of compiler should be to be to
assume that it indeed does so. Doing otherwise starts to get into
very-scary territory.

The initial problem here is that we do not properly tag memory-outputs of
inline asm as definitely being a store to that memory. They should be
so-tagged. When we fix that bug, then code like this (compiled with
optimizations, but no special hardening flags):
int f() {
  int out = 5;
  asm("# Do nothing, LOL!" : "=m"(out));
  return out;
}
will be compiled down to simply load an uninitialized stack value and
return it.
        movl    -4(%rsp), %eax
        ret
That is the _correct and desired_ behavior. (And, implied by this is that
with the current implementation of -ftrivial-auto-var-init, its
initialization also will be eliminated.)

That said -- if we want to implement inline-asm targeted mitigations in
certain hardening modes, I'm not saying we cannot do that. It's just that
we need to be clear that it _is_ special hardening behavior.

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 2:13 PM JF Bastien <jfbastien at apple.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mar 26, 2019, at 10:15 AM, Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 5:11 PM JF Bastien <jfbastien at apple.com> wrote:
>
> If an asm's constraints claim that the variable is an output, but then
> don't actually write to it, that's a bug (at least if the value is actually
> used afterwards). An output-only constraint on inline asm definitely does
> _not_ mean "pass through the previous value unchanged, if the asm failed to
> actually write to it". If you need that behavior, it's spelled "+m", not
> "=m".
>
> We do seem to fail to take advantage of this for memory outputs (again,
> this is not just for ftrivial-auto-var-init -- we ought to eliminate manual
> initialization just the same), which I'd definitely consider an
> missing-optimization bug.
>
>
> You mean we assume C code is buggy and asm code is not buggy because
> compiler fails to disprove that there is a bug?
> Doing this optimization without -ftrivial-auto-var-init looks
> reasonable, compilers do optimizations assuming absence of bugs
> throughout. But -ftrivial-auto-var-init is specifically about assuming
> these bugs are everywhere.
>
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 10:16 AM Alexander Potapenko <glider at google.com>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 2:58 PM James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com>
> wrote:
>
> Please be more specific about the problem, because your simplified example
> doesn't actually show an issue. If I write this function:
> int foo() {
> int retval;
> asm("# ..." : "=r"(retval));
> return retval;
> }
> it already does get treated as definitely writing retval, and optimizes
> away the initialization (whether you explicitly initialize retval, or use
> -ftrivial-auto-var-init).
> Example: https://godbolt.org/z/YYBCXL
>
> This is probably because you're passing retval as a register output.
> If you change "=r" to "=m" (https://godbolt.org/z/ulxSgx), it won't be
> optimized away.
> (I admit I didn't know about the difference)
>
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 8:35 AM Alexander Potapenko via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Hi JF et al.,
>
> In the Linux kernel we often encounter the following pattern:
>
> type op(...) {
> type retval;
> inline asm(... retval ...);
> return retval;
> }
>
> , which is used to implement low-level platform-dependent memory
> operations.
>
> Some of these operations turn out to be very hot, so we probably don't
> want to initialize |retval| given that it's always initialized in the
> assembly.
>
> However it's practically impossible to tell that a variable is being
> written to by the inline assembly, or figure out the size of that
> write.
> Perhaps we could speculatively treat every scalar output of an inline
> assembly routine as an initialized value (which is true for the Linux
> kernel, but I'm not sure about other users of inline assembly, e.g.
> video codecs).
>
> WDYT?
>
>
> --
> Alexander Potapenko
> Software Engineer
>
> Google Germany GmbH
> Erika-Mann-Straße, 33
> 80636 München
>
> Geschäftsführer: Paul Manicle, Halimah DeLaine Prado
> Registergericht und -nummer: Hamburg, HRB 86891
> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
>
>
>
> --
> Alexander Potapenko
> Software Engineer
>
> Google Germany GmbH
> Erika-Mann-Straße, 33
> 80636 München
>
> Geschäftsführer: Paul Manicle, Halimah DeLaine Prado
> Registergericht und -nummer: Hamburg, HRB 86891
> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg
>
>
> Does kernel asm use "+m" or "=m"?
>
> If asm _must_ write to that variable, then we could improve DSE in
> normal case (ftrivial-auto-var-init is not enabled). If
> ftrivial-auto-var-init is enabled, then strictly saying we should not
> remove initialization because we did not prove that asm actually
> writes. But we may remove initialization as well for practical
> reasons.
>
> Alex mentioned that in some cases we don't know actual address/size of
> asm writes. But we should know it if a local var is passed to the asm,
> which should be the case for kernel atomic asm blocks.
>
> Interestingly, ftrivial-auto-var-init DSE must not be stronger then
> non-ftrivial-auto-var-init DSE, unless we are talking about our own
> emitted initialization stores, in such case ftrivial-auto-var-init DSE
> may remove then more aggressively then what normal DSE would do, we
> don't actually have to _prove_ that the init store is dead.
>
>
>
> IMO the auto var init mitigation shouldn’t change the DSE optimization at
> all. We shouldn’t treat the stores we add any different. We should just
> improve DSE and everything benefits (auto var init moreso).
>
>
> But you realize that this "just" improve involves fully understanding
> static and dynamic behavior of arbitrary assembly for any architecture
> without even using integrated asm? ;)
>
>
> If you want to solve every problem however unlikely, yes. If you narrow
> what you’re doing to a handful of cases that matter, no.
>
>
> How can we improve DSE to handle all main kernel patterns that matter?
> Can we? It's still unclear to me. Extending this optimization to
> generic DSE and all stores can make it much harder (unsolvable)
> problem...
>
>
> Right now there's a handful of places in the kernel where we have to
> use __attribute__((uninitialized)) just to avoid creating an extra
> initializer:
> https://github.com/google/kmsan/commit/00387943691e6466659daac0312c8c5d8f9420b9
> and
> https://github.com/google/kmsan/commit/2954f1c33a81c6f15c7331876f5b6e2fec0d631f
> All those assembly directives are using local scalar variables of size
> <= 8 bytes as "=qm" outputs, so we can narrow the problem down to "let
> DSE remove redundant stores to local scalars that are used as asm()
> "m" outputs"
> False positives will sure be possible in theory, but hopefully rare in
> practice.
>
>
> Right, you only need to teach the optimizer about asm that matters. You
> don’t need “extending this optimization to generic DSE”. What I’m saying
> is: this is generic DSE, nothing special about variable auto-init, except
> we’re making sure it help variable auto-init a lot. i.e. there’s no `if
> (VariableAutoInitIsOn)` in LLVM, there’s just some DSE smarts that are
> likely to kick in a lot more when variable auto-init is on.
>
>
>
> We can't start breaking correct user code because "hopefully rare in
> practice”.
>
>
> I’m not advocating for this.
>
>
> But we can well episodically omit our hardening
> initializing store if in most cases it is not necessary but we are not
> really sure, e.g. not sure what exactly memory an asm block writes.
>
>
> I don’t agree. It’s a bad mitigation if it sometimes goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>
>
> There is huge difference complexity-wise between a 100% sound proof
> and a best-effort hint.
>
>
> Correct, and I don’t think you need a 100% solution for DSE (i.e. you
> don’t need to understand the semantics of all assembly instructions for all
> ISAs). You just need to hit the cases that matter (some instructions on
> some ISAs), and have those cases remain 100% sound.
>
>
> This is very special about auto-initializing
> stores.
>
> I mean, I agree, all others being equal we prefer handling it on
> common grounds. But still don't see all others being equal here. From
> what Alex says, it's not possible to figure out what exactly memory an
> asm block writes.
>
>
> Agreed, and I’m not saying that this needs to happen.
>
> I’ll re-iterate: which asm statements result in extraneous initialization?
> What instructions are they?
>
>
> I would still love to know what's the main source of truth for the
> semantics of asm() constraints.
>
>
> I don’t think you can trust programmer-provided constraints, unless you
> also add diagnostics to warn on incorrect constraints.
>
>
> For example, we've noticed that the BSF instruction, which can be used
> as follows:
>
> unsigned long ffs(unsigned long word) {
> unsigned long ret;
> asm("rep; bsf %1,%0" : "=r" (ret) : "rm" (word));
> return ret;
> }
>
> isn't guaranteed to initialize its output in the case |word| is 0
> (according to unnamed Intel architect, it just zeroes out the top 32
> bits of the return value).
> Therefore the elimination of dead stores to |ret| done by both Clang
> and GCC is correct only if the callers are careful enough.
>
> --
> Alexander Potapenko
> Software Engineer
>
> Google Germany GmbH
> Erika-Mann-Straße, 33
> 80636 München
>
> Geschäftsführer: Paul Manicle, Halimah DeLaine Prado
> Registergericht und -nummer: Hamburg, HRB 86891
> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg
>
>
>
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