[LLVMdev] extractelement causes memory access violation - what to do?

Pete Cooper peter_cooper at apple.com
Wed Jul 1 10:08:37 PDT 2015


Sorry for chiming in so late in this.

So I agree that negative indices are UB, I don’t think thats contentious.

However, I think the issue here is the DAG expansion.  That is the point at which we go from UB which would just be hidden in the instruction to something which can crash.  I think its at that point where we should mask to ensure that the in memory expansion doesn’t read out of bounds.  On architectures which do the variable extract in an instruction, they won’t be penalized by a mask, only the memory expansion will be which should be rarer,

The point about speculation at the IR level is interesting.  Personally i’m ok with constant indices being speculated and variable not.  If we later want to find a good way to ask TTI whether a variable extract is cheap then we can find a way to do so.

Anyway, just my 2c.

Cheers,
Pete
> On Jun 30, 2015, at 2:07 PM, Paweł Bylica <chfast at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 11:03 PM Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov <mailto:hfinkel at anl.gov>> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Paweł Bylica" <chfast at gmail.com <mailto:chfast at gmail.com>>
> > To: "David Majnemer" <david.majnemer at gmail.com <mailto:david.majnemer at gmail.com>>
> > Cc: "LLVMdev" <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>>
> > Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2015 5:42:24 AM
> > Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] extractelement causes memory access violation - what   to do?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 5:42 PM David Majnemer <
> > david.majnemer at gmail.com <mailto:david.majnemer at gmail.com> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 7:00 AM, Paweł Bylica < chfast at gmail.com <mailto:chfast at gmail.com> >
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > Let's have a simple program:
> >
> > define i32 @main(i32 %n, i64 %idx) {
> > %idxSafe = trunc i64 %idx to i5
> > %r = extractelement <4 x i32> <i32 -1, i32 -1, i32 -1, i32 -1>, i64
> > %idx
> > ret i32 %r
> > }
> >
> >
> > The assembly of that would be:
> >
> > pcmpeqd %xmm0, %xmm0
> > movdqa %xmm0, -24(%rsp)
> > movl -24(%rsp,%rsi,4), %eax
> > retq
> >
> >
> > The language reference states that the extractelement instruction
> > produces undefined value in case the index argument is invalid (our
> > case). But the implementation simply dumps the vector to the stack
> > memory, calculates the memory offset out of the index value and
> > tries to access the memory. That causes the crash.
> >
> >
> > The workaround is to trunc the index value before extractelement (see
> > %idxSafe). But what should be the ultimate solution?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > We could fix this by specifying that out of bounds access on an
> > extractelement leads to full-on undefined behavior, no need to force
> > everyone to eat the cost of a mask.
> >
> >
> > I don't have preference for any of the solutions.
> >
> >
> > I have a side question. It is not stated explicitly in the reference
> > but I would assume the index of extractelement is processed as an
> > unsigned value. However, the DAG Builder extends the index with
> > sext. Is it correct?
> 
> Hrmm. Given that only (small) positive numbers are valid, it shouldn't matter. Unless we can find a reason that it works better to be sext, it seems conceptually cleaner to make it zext.
> 
> I have tried to change it to zext. 2 Mips test have failed. I haven't checked the details though.
> sext looks pretty wrong to me because i5 -1 does not mean 31 any more.
> 
> - PB
>  
> 
>  -Hal
> 
> >
> >
> > - PB
> > _______________________________________________
> > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu>         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu <http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/>
> > http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev <http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev>
> >
> 
> --
> Hal Finkel
> Assistant Computational Scientist
> Leadership Computing Facility
> Argonne National Laboratory
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev

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