[PATCH] D36562: [Bitfield] Make the bitfield a separate location if it has width of legal integer type and its bit offset is naturally aligned for the type

[Hal Finkel via llvm-commits]

On 08/09/2017 10:14 PM, Xinliang David Li via llvm-commits wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 7:42 PM, Chandler Carruth via Phabricator 
> <reviews at reviews.llvm.org <mailto:reviews at reviews.llvm.org>> wrote:
>
>     chandlerc added a comment.
>
>     This has been discussed before and I still pretty strongly
>     disagree with it.
>
>     This cripples the ability of TSan to find race conditions between
>     accesses to consecutive bitfields -- and these bugs have actually
>     come up.
>
>
>
> Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean race conditions due to widening?
>
>     We also have had cases in the past where LLVM missed significant
>     bitfield combines and optimizations due to loading them as
>     separate integers. Those would become problems again, and I think
>     they would be even harder to solve than narrowing the access is
>     going to be because we will have strictly less information to work
>     with.
>
>
>  Can you elaborate here too? If there were missed optimization that 
> later got fixed, there should be regression tests for them, right?  
> And what information is missing?

To make a general statement, if we load (a, i8) and (a+2, i16), for 
example, and these came from some structure, we've lost the information 
that the load (a+1, i8) would have been legal (i.e. is known to be 
deferenceable). This is not specific to bit fields, but the fact that we 
lose information on the dereferenceable byte ranges around memory access 
turns into a problem when we later can't legally widen. There may be a 
better way to keep this information other than producing wide loads 
(which is an imperfect mechanism, especially the way we do it by 
restricting to legal integer types), but at the moment, we don't have 
anything better.

  -Hal

>
> thanks,
>
> David
>
>
>     Ultimately, while I understand the appeal of this approach, I
>     don't think it is correct and I think we should instead figure out
>     how to optimize these memory accesses well in LLVM. That approach
>     will have the added benefit of optimizing cases where the user has
>     manually used a large integer to simulate bitfields, and making
>     combining and canonicalization substantially easier.
>
>
>     Repository:
>       rL LLVM
>
>     https://reviews.llvm.org/D36562 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D36562>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory

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