[LLVMdev] Bitcasts between pointers with different address spaces

[Nick Lewycky]

Mon Ping Wang wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't think we should make bit casts between pointers with different
> address spaces illegal. Address spaces are not required to be disjoint.
> In the N1169 spec, it says
> A non-null pointer into an address space A can be cast to a pointer into
> another address space B, but such a cast is undefined if the source
> pointer does not point to a location in B.

Use a ptrtoint + inttoptr to implement the cast.

> If the address spaces overlap, one should be able to bticast between them.

I am not okay with having the verifier accept or reject a bitcast based 
on the contents of the TargetData. Given that we intend to permit 
different address spaces to have different sized pointers, we'll need to 
reject all cross address-space bitcasts and casts will need to go 
through ptrtoint+inttoptr which makes the potential for truncation and 
extension of the value explicit.

Is that acceptable? In particular, it still permits you to have 
overlapping address spaces, right?

Nick

> On Sep 7, 2012, at 10:47 AM, Villmow, Micah wrote:
>
>> Should LLVM make bitcasts between pointers with different address
>> spaces illegal?
>> This will require a small clarification in the documentation and an
>> assertion check added to the verifier, but I think this would be a
>> good approach.
>> The reason being is that in different address spaces, pointers are not
>> always the same size.
>> This could be limited to make it legal only if the size of the pointer
>> in source and destination address spaces are equivalent, but that
>> seems like more of a work-around than a proper solution.
>> Ideas?
>> Micah
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>
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