[llvm-dev] Separate AA metadata for load/store portions of memcpy

[Keno Fischer via llvm-dev]

I feel like the !nonnull metadata is a bit different, because the
nonnull attribute is used on declarations as well, not just on call
sites. I suppose there's nothing preventing the same from being true
for AA metadata as well, but I don't currently see a use case for that
(do you?).

Keno

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
>
> On 04/17/2017 05:15 PM, Keno Fischer wrote:
>>
>> This is going back to something I had asked on IRC about a few weeks
>> ago and promised
>> to get back to when I had some time to actually work on it. For
>> background:
>>
>> Currently, we can annotate tbaa on memcpy's, but when we do so, the
>> semantics consider it to apply to *both* the load and the store part
>> of the memcpy. This is quite a significant limitation and the cause of
>> a good amount of lost TBAA precision in my frontend (and I would
>> imagine Clang as well,
>> though I have no data or experiments to back that up). Note that while
>> I'm mostly concerned with TBAA here, the same is certainly true of
>> noalias and alias.scope metadata as well.
>>
>> Now, a few weeks ago, I simply hacked around this (locally) by
>> introducing new !tbaa_src, !tbaa_dst,
>> !noalias_src, !noalias_dest, !alias.scope_src, !alias.scope_dst
>> metadata and adjusting LLVM to use that. This was a relatively simple
>> change, but of course it feels rather unsatisfying and suffers from
>> the problem that there's now some redundancy. On discussing this on
>> IRC, I believe Hal had
>> suggested that we might want to consider adding some way to add
>> metadata on function arguments
>> (and I apologize if I misremembered the exact proposal), to be able to
>> write things like:
>>
>> call void @llvm.memcpy(i8* %dest !tbaa !1 !noalias !2, i8* %src !tbaa
>> !2 !noalias !3, ...)
>>
>> Of course we currently don't allow this kind of thing in the IR at
>> all, so this would be a pretty major
>> change. I'd like to solicit some opinions on the best way to represent
>> this in the IR (in particular
>> whether it's worth introducing a way to annotate AA MD on function
>> arguments to avoid the uglyness of introducing 2N extra metadata
>> tags).
>
>
> Part of my motivation for suggesting this was that we already have a fair
> amount of duplication between attributes and metadata (e.g. we have a
> nonnull attribute and nonnull metadata). Does anyone else have an opinion
> here?
>
>  -Hal
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Keno
>
>
> --
> Hal Finkel
> Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
> Leadership Computing Facility
> Argonne National Laboratory
>