[llvm-dev] Possible soundness issue with available_externally (split from "RFC: Add guard intrinsics")

[Duncan P. N. Exon Smith via llvm-dev]

> On 2016-Feb-25, at 08:33, Sanjoy Das <sanjoy at playingwithpointers.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hal Finkel wrote:
> > That summary needs unnecessarily broad. So far we've learned that: a) There are issues with atomics b) there are issues
> > with a safe-to-speculate attribute we don't yet have c) there might be issues with folding undefs independent of the
> > previous two items, but we thus-far lack a concrete example. We don't yet have enough information.
> 
> 
> I don't have a good example for (c), but if you go by the textbook "is
> a non-deterministic value" definition for undef then
> 
>  void foo() available_externally {
>    %x = create_undef();
>    if (%x) print("X");
>  }
> 
> is just as problematic as the two atomic loads case.  This isn't a
> good example though, since we can specify as part of `undef` s
> semantics: "if the program has different observable behavior based on
> undef's non-determinism, then it is undefined".  However, if we do
> that, we'll get stuck in cases like
> 
>  // In C
>  void foo() {
>    int c;
>    if (c) print("X");
>    escape(&c);  // escape is an empty function
>  }
> 
> which I think is not UB in C (is it?), but will boil down to the kind
> of IR above.

I'm pretty sure the `if (c)` is UB because it's branching on an uninitialized
value, which could have a trap representation.


> 
> -- Sanjoy