[LLVMdev] Unexpected behavior reading/writing <8 x i1> vector to memory

[Matt Pharr]

I'm seeing some behavior that surprised me in writing an <8 x i1> vector to memory and reading it back.  (Specifically, the surprise is that I didn't get the original value back!).  This happens both with TOT and 2.9.  This program illustrates the issue:

define i32 @foo() {
  %c = alloca <8 x i1>
  store <8 x i1> <i1 true, i1 false, i1 false, i1 false, i1 false, i1 false, i1 false, i1 false>,  <8 x i1>* %c
  %val = load <8 x i1>* %c
  %vali8 = bitcast <8 x i1> %val to i8
  %vali32 = zext i8 %vali8 to i32
  ret i32 %vali32
}

If I run this through opt -mem2reg before compiling with llc, then I basically get:

_foo:
	movl	$1, %eax
	ret

which looks good to me (and is the result I expect).

If I just run it through llc without mem2reg,I get this suspicious output, which returns zero.

_foo:
	movb	$1, -8(%rsp)
	movb	$0, -8(%rsp)
	movzbl	-8(%rsp), %eax
	ret

Is this a bug?  I double checked the LLVM assembly reference manual and didn't see anything about writing vectors of i1 to memory as being undefined.

(I recognize that I probably don't want to be doing this in general and wouldn't expect it to necessarily be super efficient.  But this was unusual enough that it seemed worth checking about.)

Thanks,
-matt