[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] put "str" in __attribute__((annotate("str"))) to dwarf

[Y Song via cfe-dev]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 9:43 AM Adrian Prantl via cfe-dev
<cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
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> On Jun 14, 2021, at 6:44 PM, David Blaikie via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
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> On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 4:54 PM David Rector <davrecthreads at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Jun 14, 2021, at 5:33 PM, Y Song via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
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>> On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 1:25 PM David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 12:25 PM Y Song <ys114321 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 9:59 AM Alexei Starovoitov
>> <alexei.starovoitov at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 07:17:32AM -0400, Aaron Ballman wrote:
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>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 8:47 PM Alexei Starovoitov
>> <alexei.starovoitov at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 12:42 PM David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Any suggestions/preferences for the spelling, Aaron?
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>> I don't know this domain particularly well, so takes these suggestions
>> with a giant grain of salt:
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>> If the concept is specific to DWARF and you don't think it'll need to
>> extend into other debug formats, you could go with `dwarf_annotate`.
>> If it's not really a DWARF thing but is more about B[P|T]F, then
>> `btf_annotate`  or `bpf_annotate` could work, but those may be a bit
>> mysterious to folks outside of the domain. If it's a generic debug
>> info concept, probably `debug_info_annotate` or something.
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>> Arguably it can/could be a generic debug info or dwarf thing, but for now we don't have any use for it other than to squirrel info along to BTF/BPF so I'm on the fence about which prefix to use exactly
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>> A bit more bike shedding colors...
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>> The __rcu and __user annations might be used by the clang itself eventually.
>> Currently the "sparse" tool is doing this analysis and warns users
>> when __rcu pointer is incorrectly accessed in the kernel C code.
>> If clang can do that directly that could be a huge selling point
>> for folks to switch from gcc to clang for kernel builds.
>> The front-end would treat such annotations as arbitrary string, but
>> special "building-linux-kernel-pass" would interpret the semantical context.
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>> Are __rcu and __user annotations notionally distinct things from bpf
>> (and perhaps each other as well)? Distinct enough that it would make
>> sense to use a different attribute name for user source for each need?
>> I suspect the answer is yes given that the existing annotations have
>> their own names which are distinct, but I don't know this domain
>> enough to be sure.
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>> __rcu and __user don't overlap. __rcu is not a single annotation though.
>> It's a combination of annotations in pointers, functions, macros.
>> Some functions have:
>> __acquires(rcu)
>> another function might have:
>> __acquires(rcu_bh)
>> There are several flavors of the RCU in the kernel.
>> So single __attribute__((rcu_annotate("foo"))) won't work even within RCU scope.
>> But if we do:
>> struct foo {
>>  void * __attribute__((tag("ptr.rcu_bh")) ptr;
>> };
>> int bar(int) __attribute__((tag("acquires.rcu_bh")) { ... }
>> int baz(int) __attribute__((tag("releases.rcu_bh")) { ... }
>> int qux(int) __attribute__((tag("acquires.rcu_sched")) { ... }
>> ...
>> The clang pass can parse these strings and correlate one tag to another.
>> RCU flavors come and go, so clang cannot hard code the names.
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>> Maybe we can name it as "bpf_tag" as it is a "tag" for "bpf" use case?
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>> David, in one of your early emails, you mentioned:
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>> ===
>> Arguably it can/could be a generic debug info or dwarf thing, but for
>> now we don't have any use for it other than to squirrel info along to
>> BTF/BPF so I'm on the fence about which prefix to use exactly
>> ===
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>> and suggests since it might be used in the future for non-bpf things,
>> maybe the name could be a little more generic then bpf-specific.
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>> Do you have any suggestions on what name to pick?
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>> Nah, not especially. bpf_tag sounds OK-ish to me if it suits you.
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>> The more generic the better IMO.  And, the less the need to parse string literals the better.
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>> Why not simply `__attribute__((debuginfo("arg1", "arg2", ...)))`, e.g.:
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>> ```
>> #define BPF_TAG(...) __attribute__((debuginfo("bpf", __VA_ARGS__)))
>> struct foo {
>>  void * BPF_TAG("ptr","rcu","bh") ptr;
>> };
>> #define BPF_RCU_TAG(PFX, ...) BPF(PFX, "rcu", __VA_ARGS__)
>> int bar(int) BPF_RCU_TAG("acquires","bh") { ... }
>> int baz(int) BPF_RCU_TAG("releases","bh") { ... }
>> int qux(int) BPF_RCU_TAG("acquires","sched") { ... }
>> ```
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> Unless Paul & Adrian, etc chime in in agreement of a more general name, like 'debuginfo', I'm inclined to avoid that/go with something bpf specific until there's a broader use case/proposal, something we might be able to/want to encourage GCC to support too. Otherwise we're taking a pretty broad attribute name & choosing its behavior when we don't necessarily have a lot of leverage if GCC ends up using that name for something else.
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> There are definitely use-cases for threading a general string attribute through LLVM IR all the way to DWARF. Recently I thought about how to best encode API Swiftification attributes (e.g., https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/objective-c_and_c_code_customization/renaming_objective-c_apis_for_swift) in DWARF. These are Clang attributes put on (Objective-)C type declarations that tell the Swift compiler how to map C and Objective-C types into Swift. The attributes range from nullability of pointers to renaming types to better fit into the Swift world. Having a generic DWARF facility to encode any Clang __attribute__(()) declaration would make this very straightforward to implement.
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> Maybe this is a good opportunity to design a generic mechanism that works for all attributes? We probably need to add a little more structure than just encoding a single string with the attribute contents to make the encoding more efficient, but we could probably have something generic enough to be useful across many use-cases.
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> Is there any interest in attempting this or do you prefer with targeted extensions for each kind of attribute?

David,

What is your opinion on this? Even if we want to emit all clang
__attribute__(())'s as a string to dwarf, I think
bpf_tag(()) is still needed since it is an attribute to introduce bpf
tag strings.

But encoding in IR/bitcode/dwarf probably needs more discussion and
possibly we may need to introduce strlist form
in dwarf so different attributes won't mix with each other. The
IR/bitcode representation will be a challenge and the
value might need to be a vector of strings.

Also, by default, I think we should encode bpf_tag() attributes into
dwarf since bpf_tag() is designed to be passed
to dwarf. For all other attributes, we may want to have a frontend
flag to control whether to put their attribute strings
in dwarf or not.

Just my 2cents.

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> -- adrian
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> & as for separate strings - maybe, but I'm not sure what that'll look like in the resulting DWARF, what sort of form would you propose using to encode that? (same question below \/)
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>> Sounds good. I will use "bpf_tag" as the starting point now.
>> Also, it is possible "bpf_tag" may appear multiple times for the same
>> function, declaration etc.
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>> For example,
>>  #define __bpf_tag(s) __attribute__((bpf_tag(s)))
>>  int g __bpf_tag("str1") __bpf_tag("str2");
>> Let us say we introduced a LLVM vendor tag DWARF_AT_LLVM_bpf_tag.
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>> How do you want the above to be represented in dwarf?
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>> My current scheme is to put all bpf_tag's in a string, separated by ",".
>> This will make things simpler. So the final output will be
>>     DWARF_AT_LLVM_bpf_tag  "str1,str2"
>> I may need to do a discussion with the kernel folks to use a different
>> delimiter than ",", but we still represent all tags with ONE string.
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>> But alternatively, it could be represented as a list of strings like
>>   DWARF_AT_LLVM_bpf_tag
>>             "str1"
>>             "str2"
>> is similar to DWARF_AT_location.
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> What DWARF form were you thinking of using for this? There isn't a built in form that provides encoding for multiple delimited/separated strings that I know of.
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>> The first internal representation
>>   DWARF_AT_LLVM_bpf_tag  "str1,str2"
>> should be easier for IR/bitcode read/write and dwarf parsing.
>>
>> What do you think?
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