[LLVMdev] Proposal to add Bitcode version field to bitcode file wrapper

[Yung, Douglas]

Hi,

We would like to add a version number to the bitcode wrapper. This feature would allow easier identification of what compiler produced the bitcode so that known incompatibilities with LTO compilation could be detected. Roughly speaking, this version number would consist of the major, minor and optionally the patch version of the compiler used to produce the bitcode. The version information would be encoded in 4 bytes, with the first byte representing the major version number, the second byte the minor version number, and the third and fourth bytes optionally encoding the patch version or other information. As to where to place this information, we are considering two different possibilities for updating the bitcode wrapper specification.

The first is to simply add a single 32bit wide field at the end of the existing bitcode wrapper format field. This would result in the new structure looking like this:

[Magic_{32}, Version_{32}, Offset_{32}, Size_{32}, CPUType_{32}, BitcodeVersion_{32}]

All of the existing fields would keep their current meanings, and the new field BitcodeVersion is simply appended with the format described in the first paragraph.

A second idea was to use the existing Version field in the bitcode wrapper format to store the bitcode version information. According to the documentation (http://llvm.org/docs/BitCodeFormat.html#bitcode-wrapper-format) this field is currently always set to 0. This would allow us to make use of what is (presumably) an unused field.

As this is a feature that we feel would be beneficial to the community, we wanted to get feedback on the design for our upcoming patches. Any thoughts or opinions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Douglas Yung
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