[llvm-dev] RFC: metadata attachments for global variables

[David Blaikie via llvm-dev]

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 2:10 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 2:09 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev <
>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Duncan P. N. Exon Smith <
>>>> dexonsmith at apple.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> > On 2016-May-06, at 13:17, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Hi all,
>>>>> >
>>>>> > I'd like to add support for metadata attachments for global
>>>>> variables in the same way as we did for functions.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Syntax would be pretty simple:
>>>>> > @foo = global i32 0, !foo !0, !bar !1
>>>>> > (the extra commas are required to disambiguate from a named metadata
>>>>> on the next line)
>>>>>
>>>>> SGTM.
>>>>>
>>>>> > Benefits:
>>>>> > 1) Lets us reverse the DIGlobalVariable -> GlobalVariable edge,
>>>>> which should hopefully clear the way for removing the llvm.dbg.cu
>>>>> named metadata node.
>>>>>
>>>>> A little harder than it sounds (need to somehow support a
>>>>> GlobalVariable that is RAUW'ed with a ConstantInt), but I think this is
>>>>> important to do.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> How can a GlobalVariable be replaced with a ConstantInt? Wouldn't that
>>>> just be an absolute address?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If the global variable has a known constant value & the address is never
>>> needed, then we might optimize away the storage and still want debug info
>>> describing the constant.
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure under what conditions, if any, that currently works - so
>> this may be more of a "nice to have" or "be good to think about how any
>> future design wouldn't preclude fixing this gap" sort of thing.
>>
>
> It looks like this is how debug info for static data members used to look
> until r172591 landed back in 2013.
>

Could you explain more what you mean by "<this> is how it worked until" -
'this' being how it used to work and how you're proposing to make it work?
I'm not quite following.


> There are a couple of tests that exercise this path
> (DebugInfo/X86/multiple-at-const-val.ll and DebugInfo/X86/pr12831.ll) but
> it seems likely that they were just upgraded manually.
>
> Do we care about backwards compatibility for debug info from that far back?
>

Yeah, pretty sure we don't care.


> I assume we don't, since this predates the last debug info version bump in
> 2015 (r231082 which introduced the debug info hierarchy). If that's the
> case, I intend to "upgrade" this metadata by dropping it, and we can
> probably think of some other representation later for a constant folded
> global.
>

Upgrades to the verifier to fail when it sees this would be good too, most
likely. (maybe? maybe not... not sure)


>
> Thanks,
> --
> --
> Peter
>
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