[llvm-dev] AliasAnalysis does not look though a memcpy (original) (raw)

Finkel, Hal J. via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Thu Dec 6 08:07:33 PST 2018

On 12/6/18 8:33 AM, Andrew Savonichev wrote:

Finkel, Hal J. writes:

On 12/5/18 2:14 PM, Andrew Savonichev wrote:

On 12/5/18 9:51 AM, Andrew Savonichev via llvm-dev wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to get AA results for two pointers, but it seems that AA cannot look though a memcpy. For example: define dsolocal spirfunc void @fun() { entry: ; Store an address of var'_ _%var = alloca i32, align 4_ _store i32 42, i32* %var, align 4_ _%var.addr = alloca i32*, align 8_ _store i32* %var, i32** %var.addr, align 8_ _; Memcpy var.addr' to var.addr.tmp'_ _%var.addr.tmp = alloca i32*, align 8_ _%0 = bitcast i32** %var.addr.tmp to i8*_ _%1 = bitcast i32** %var.addr to i8*_ _call void @llvm.memcpy.p0i8.p0i8.i64(i8* align 8 %0, i8* align 8 %1, i64 8, i1 false)_ _; Load a copy of var' %var.tmp = load i32*, i32** %var.addr.tmp %should.be.42 = load i32, i32* %var.tmp ret void } ; Function Attrs: argmemonly nounwind declare void @llvm.memcpy.p0i8.p0i8.i64(i8* nocapture writeonly, i8* nocapture readonly, i64, i1) #1 attributes #1 = { argmemonly nounwind } I run it with opt, and get the following: $ opt -basicaa -print-alias-sets memcpy.ll -disable-output Alias sets for function 'fun': Alias Set Tracker: 3 alias sets for 6 pointer values. AliasSet[0x5b5df0, 2] may alias, Mod/Ref Pointers: (i32* %var, LocationSize::precise(4)), (i32* %var.tmp, LocationSize::precise(4)) AliasSet[0x5b5e90, 2] must alias, Mod/Ref Pointers: (i32** %var.addr, LocationSize::precise(8)), (i8* %1, LocationSize::precise(8)) AliasSet[0x5b7390, 2] must alias, Mod/Ref Pointers: (i8* %0, LocationSize::precise(8)), (i32** %var.addr.tmp, LocationSize::precise(8)) So AA says that %var and %var.tmp "may alias", but I'd expect to get a "must alias". What can be done to determine that %var and %var.tmp are actually the same pointer in this case? Can anyone suggest how to get the expected results from AA? InstCombiner and other LLVM passes can probably remove a memcpy and make IR a lot easier for AA, but I'd like to get the analysis working for not-optimized IR as well. Hi, Andrew, To be clear, you'd like BasicAA to look back, not just trough the memcpy, but also through the loads and stores of the addresses? Yes, exactly. I was mostly concerned about memcpy, but you're right, loads/stores of addresses seems to have the same issue. We've not generally seen a need to put this kind of logic into BasicAA, and even if we were motivated to do so, we'd need to be very careful about compile-time impact. Understood. I assume that the best way to ensure that is to add this logic into a new AA. BasicAA currently doesn't do any of that under the presumption that, once SROA, InstCombine, etc. do promotion and simplification, AA will be able to understand the rest. That is what I thought. Thanks for the confirmation. Can you say more about the use case? OpenCL C has a notion of Generic Address Space (GAS), allowing you to cast a pointer from any (named) address space to a GAS pointer. Then you can use this GAS pointer instead of a named AS pointer. Compiler is responsible to infer the original address space of a GAS pointer when it is actually used (for load/store), otherwise this is a compilation error. That seems scary :-) -- Can this inference not be done syntactically in Clang? From a frontend perspective, a GAS pointer is just a pointer: void foo(int *p, int *q) { *p = 42; *q = 43; }; Until Clang reaches a call site, it has no idea about real address spaces of p' and q'. When we do reach a call site, `foo()' can already be CodeGen'ed, so we can't really change anything.

Is this supposed to work like template instantiation? Are you guaranteed to only get one (unique) set of address spaces for the function arguments?

We can change the order that functions are emitted in Clang if necessary.

 -Hal

So I'm trying to follow a pointer from a point of origin (i.e. addrspacecast private ptr -> generic ptr) and look through a sequence of bitcasts, GEPs, function calls and pointer copies through memory. AliasAnalysis and MemDepAnalysis give me all the required information to do intraprocedural analysis, except for the memcpy case that I raised in this thread. >> Since a failure to infer an address space means a compilation error, I'm trying to get this analysis working for debug builds, where we do not run InstCombine and other aggressive optimizations.

Hal Finkel Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages Leadership Computing Facility Argonne National Laboratory

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