[llvm-dev] [RFC] Embedded bitcode and related upstream (Part II)

[Nico Weber via llvm-dev]

Hi Steven,

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 2:36 PM, Steven Wu via cfe-commits <
cfe-commits at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone
>
> I am still in the process of upstreaming some improvements to the embed
> bitcode option. If you want more background, you can read the previous RFC (
> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-February/094851.html). This
> is part II of the discussion.
>
> Current Status:
> A basic version of -fembed-bitcode option is upstreamed and functioning.
> You can use -fembed-bitcode={off, all, bitcode, marker} option to control
> what gets embedded in the final object file output:
> off: default, nothing gets embedded.
> all: optimized bitcode and command line options gets embedded in the
> object file.
> bitcode: only optimized bitcode is embedded
> marker: only put a marker in the object file
>
> What needs to be improved:
> 1. Whitelist for command line options that can be used with bitcode:
> Current trunk implementation embeds all the cc1 command line options (that
> includes header include paths, warning flags and other front-end options)
> in the command line section. That is lot of redundant information. To
> re-create the object file from the embedded optimized bitcode, most of
> these options are useless. On the other hand, they can leak information of
> the source code. One solution will be keeping a list of all the options
> that can affect code generation but not encoded in the bitcode. I have
> internally prototyped with disallowing these options explicitly and allowed
> only the reminder of the  options to be embedded (http://reviews.llvm.org/
> D17394). A better solution might be encoding that information in
> "Options.td" as specific group.
>
> 2. Assembly input handling:
> This is a workaround to allow source code written in assembly to work with
> "-fembed-bitcode" options. When compiling assembly source code with
> "-fembed-bitcode", clang-as creates an empty section "__LLVM, __asm" in the
> object file. That is just a way to distinguish object files compiled from
> assembly source from those compiled from higher level source code but
> forgot to use "-fembed-bitcode" options. Linker can use this section to
> diagnose if "-fembed-bitcode" is consistently used on all the object files
> participated in the linking.
>

It looks like shipping Xcode's clang has this behavior, but open-source
clang still doesn't. Can you contribute it? It's very useful to us if
open-source clang has the same features as the clang shipping in Xcode.
(That last sentence is true in general, not just for this specific feature.)


>
> 3. Bitcode symbol hiding:
> There was some concerns for leaking source code information when using
> bitcode feature. One approach to avoid the leak is to add a pass which
> renames all the globals and metadata strings. The also keeps a reverse map
> in case the original name needs to be recovered. The final bitcode should
> contain no more symbols or debug info than a stripped binary. To make sure
> modified bitcode can still be linked correctly, the renaming need to be
> consistent across all bitcode participated in the linking and everything
> that is external of the linkage unit need to be preserved. This means the
> pass can only be run during the linking and requires some LTO api.
>
> 4. Debug info strip to line-tables pass:
> As the name suggested, this pass strip down the full debug info to
> line-tables only. This is also one of the steps we took to prevent the leak
> of source code information in bitcode.
>
> Please let me know what do you think about the pieces above or if you have
> any concerns about the methodology. I will put up patches for review soon.
>
> Thanks
>
> Steven
>
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>
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