[LLVMdev] RFC: Proposal for Poison Semantics (original) (raw)

Philip Reames listmail at philipreames.com
Wed Jan 28 21:42:17 PST 2015

On 01/27/2015 09:38 PM, Sanjoy Das wrote:

if the definition of NUW is that zext-ing the result is equivalent to zext-ing the inputs and doing the operation at a higher bitwidth (my understanding), then %m and %n cannot hold those values, that would violate the NUW flag. The problem to solve is adequately defining "cannot hold". In the strictest sense, you could say if %m = %n = 2^31 - 1 then the program has UB; in effect defining "cannot hold" in the same way a location you're loading from "cannot be" non-deferenceable. But, as David points out, that would mean you cannot hoist arithmetic with the nuw/nsw tags intact: if (foo) %t = add nuw X Y since it could be that (X != 2^32-1 && Y != 2^32-1) only if foo == true. Arithmetic with no-wrap flags effectively are side-effecting operations in this scheme. The RFC tries to formalize a weaker notion of "cannot hold" that justifies treating arithmetic like arithmetic. I'm trying to show that the notion of poison value in this RFC is too weak; and allows for certain programs to be well-defined (like the example I just showed) which change meaning in the face of transforms we'd like to be able to do. I don't think your example is actually problematic. The original program before your transformation executed undefined behavior in the form of '%x = add nuw i32 %m, %n' with "%m = %n = 2^32-1 (a.k.a INT_MAX)". If I understand the c++ spec correctly, that implies that the meaning of this program is lost, even if the value of that instruction doesn't contribute to the output of the program. We can produce any output for this program (or none, or wipe your hard drive) and it would be "correct".

To show a problem, you'd need to show a well defined program which becomes undefined through a series of transformations. In your example, you might try the input program:

br i1 %cnd, label %skip, label %exec exec: %x1 = add nuw i32 %m, %n br label %skip skip: %x = phi (x1, 0) %y = zext i32 %x to i64 %s = lshr i64 %y, 32 %addr = gep %some_global, %s store i32 42, i32* %addr

But when the add is speculated, this becomes:

%x1 = add nuw i32 %m, %n %x = select i1 %cnd x1, 0 %y = zext i32 %x to i64 %s = lshr i64 %y, 32 %addr = gep %some_global, %s store i32 42, i32* %addr

This is well defined as per the spec David sent out. %x is not poison. %x1 is, but that's fine.

Philip

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