[llvm-dev] Is trapping allowed when an add with nsw flag overflows?

[Manuel Jacob via llvm-dev]

On 2016-04-18 18:19, David Majnemer wrote:
> It comes down to observability.  It's fine to store poison into a 
> memory
> location and load it back; however, the optimizer is free to delete 
> stores
> of poison.  What is not ok is depending on the value of a load of a 
> poison
> value in code which may have observable results (volatile, system 
> calls,
> etc.).

Thank you for the clarification.

To take up the initial question, is trapping OK when a non-volatile 
store stores a poison value?

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Manuel Jacob <me at manueljacob.de> 
> wrote:
> 
>> [This mail could be an answer to the other responses as well, as they
>> basically are the same.]
>> 
>> Ah, I think I understand now what poison is for.  Adds are defined to 
>> not
>> have side-effects, so the dependence rule is needed so the optimizer 
>> is
>> allowed to exploit undefined behavior.  Is this correct?
>> 
>> I forgot to mention in my original mail that our trapping arithmetic
>> operations are fully speculable.  This means that the trap won't 
>> happen
>> until the result is e.g. stored to memory.  A bit like poison values 
>> in
>> hardware.
>> 
>> Something is still unclear to me: while, according to the examples in
>> LangRef, a volatile store has undefined behavior when a poison value 
>> is
>> stored, this seems to not be true in case of non-volatile stores.  Can
>> someone clarify please?
>> 
>> 
>> On 2016-04-15 19:44, John Regehr via llvm-dev wrote:
>> 
>>> No, trapping is not allowed, since an overflowing add nsw is defined
>>> to produce a poison value, which sort of explodes into undefined
>>> behavior if it reaches a side-effect.  This is to support speculative
>>> execution.
>>> 
>>> If you emit trapping adds for nsw, you'll see spurious traps every 
>>> now
>>> and then.
>>> 
>>> There's a stronger form of undefined behavior, exhibited by things
>>> like divide by zero, that permits traps.
>>> 
>>> John
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 4/15/16 7:28 PM, Manuel Jacob via llvm-dev wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> In our backend, we currently emit add operations that trap on 
>>>> overflow
>>>> if the IR operation has the nsw flag set.  Is this allowed?
>>>> 
>>>> According to the documentation about poison values, overflowing a 
>>>> nsw
>>>> add is undefined behavior.  However I didn't find a formal 
>>>> definition of
>>>> undefined behavior in LLVM.  Judging from previous discussions on 
>>>> the
>>>> mailing list, there seems to be a vague line of what LLVM is allowed 
>>>> to
>>>> do in case of undefined behavior.  Is trapping allowed?
>>>> 
>>>> -Manuel
>>>> 
>>>