[LLVMdev] Methods on addrspace pointers

[Brandon Holt]

I’ve been developing an optimization pass that uses the address space attribute (__attribute__((address_space(200))) to indicate different kinds of pointers to be treated differently (I’m making them be pointers to a “global” address space as in UPC).

However, I’ve hit a snag in the frontend code generator: if I try to make a method call on a pointer with a custom address space, the frontend chokes because it can’t bitcast between different address spaces, and methods are functions that take a pointer to “this” which is assumed to be in addrspace(0):

> Assertion failed: (castIsValid(op, S, Ty) && "Invalid cast!"), function Create, file ../lib/IR/Instructions.cpp, line 2352.
> 0  clang-3.4                0x00000001039527f8 llvm::sys::PrintStackTrace(__sFILE*) + 40
> 1  clang-3.4                0x0000000103952c54 SignalHandler(int) + 388
> 2  libsystem_platform.dylib 0x00007fff802395aa _sigtramp + 26
> 3  libsystem_platform.dylib 000000000000000000 _sigtramp + 2145151600
> 4  clang-3.4                0x0000000103952ab6 abort + 22
> 5  clang-3.4                0x0000000103952a91 __assert_rtn + 81
> 6  clang-3.4                0x000000010385f8bf llvm::CastInst::Create(llvm::Instruction::CastOps, llvm::Value*, llvm::Type*, llvm::Twine const&, llvm::Instruction*) + 687
> 7  clang-3.4                0x00000001030a4d1c llvm::IRBuilder<true, llvm::ConstantFolder, llvm::IRBuilderDefaultInserter<true> >::CreateCast(llvm::Instruction::CastOps, llvm::Value*, llvm::Type*, llvm::Twine const&) + 76
> 8  clang-3.4                0x0000000103bbeac3 clang::CodeGen::CodeGenFunction::EmitCall(clang::CodeGen::CGFunctionInfo const&, llvm::Value*, clang::CodeGen::ReturnValueSlot, clang::CodeGen::CallArgList const&, clang::Decl const*, llvm::Instruction**) + 3075
> 9  clang-3.4                0x0000000103c11c02 clang::CodeGen::CodeGenFunction::EmitCXXMemberCall(clang::CXXMethodDecl const*, clang::SourceLocation, llvm::Value*, clang::CodeGen::ReturnValueSlot, llvm::Value*, llvm::Value*, clang::QualType, clang::ConstExprIterator, clang::ConstExprIterator) + 738


I know it is not actually expected to be correct behavior to use other addrspace pointers in place of addrspace(0) pointers. My transformation passes change these calls, but I don’t get a chance to make the change because the frontend chokes first.

My questions are:
1. Is there a more graceful way that these bitcasts could be handled? Code to load/store from alternate address spaces is allowed to be generated, it just segfaults when run. Can the same behavior be allowed without breaking things for method calls to these pointers? I can imagine simply adding code to detect if the address space is wrong and applying an addrspace cast to get around it.

2. Is there a way to create methods that can be called with pointers to different address spaces? It seems there is no way to declare these in C++ using GNU attributes, and addrspace() seems to not be supported by C++11 attribute syntax, which could possibly express this.

Thanks,
-Brandon

--
Brandon Holt
Grad student @ University of Washington
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bholt
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