ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Saleem Abdulrasool]

Hello.

I am sending this at the behest of Renato.  I have been working on the ARM
integrated assembler in LLVM and came across an interesting item in the Linux
kernel.

I am wondering if this is an unstated covenant between the kernel and GCC or
simply a clever use of an unintended/undefined behaviour.

The Linux kernel uses the *compiler* as a fancy preprocessor to generate a
specially crafted assembly file.  This file is then post-processed via sed to
generate a header containing constants which is shared across assembly and C
sources.

In order to clarify the question, I am selecting a particular example and
pulling out the relevant bits of the source code below.

#define DEFINE(sym, val) asm volatile("\n->" #sym " %0 " #val : : "i" (val))

#define __NR_PAGEFLAGS 22

void definitions(void) {
  DEFINE(NR_PAGEFLAGS, __NR_PAGEFLAGS);
}

This is then assembled to generate the following:

->NR_PAGEFLAGS #22 __NR_PAGEFLAGS

This will later be post-processed to generate:

#define NR_PAGELAGS 22 /* __NR_PAGEFLAGS */

By using the inline assembler to evaluate (constant) expressions into constant
values and then emit that using a special identifier (->) is a fairly clever
trick.  This leads to my question: is this just use of an unintentional
"feature" or something that was worked out between the two projects.

Please explicitly CC me on any response as I am not subscribed to this mailing
list.

Thanks.

-- 
Saleem Abdulrasool
compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Andrew Pinski]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Saleem Abdulrasool
<compnerd@compnerd.org> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I am sending this at the behest of Renato.  I have been working on the ARM
> integrated assembler in LLVM and came across an interesting item in the Linux
> kernel.
>
> I am wondering if this is an unstated covenant between the kernel and GCC or
> simply a clever use of an unintended/undefined behaviour.
>
> The Linux kernel uses the *compiler* as a fancy preprocessor to generate a
> specially crafted assembly file.  This file is then post-processed via sed to
> generate a header containing constants which is shared across assembly and C
> sources.
>
> In order to clarify the question, I am selecting a particular example and
> pulling out the relevant bits of the source code below.
>
> #define DEFINE(sym, val) asm volatile("\n->" #sym " %0 " #val : : "i" (val))
>
> #define __NR_PAGEFLAGS 22
>
> void definitions(void) {
>   DEFINE(NR_PAGEFLAGS, __NR_PAGEFLAGS);
> }
>
> This is then assembled to generate the following:
>
> ->NR_PAGEFLAGS #22 __NR_PAGEFLAGS
>
> This will later be post-processed to generate:
>
> #define NR_PAGELAGS 22 /* __NR_PAGEFLAGS */
>
> By using the inline assembler to evaluate (constant) expressions into constant
> values and then emit that using a special identifier (->) is a fairly clever
> trick.  This leads to my question: is this just use of an unintentional
> "feature" or something that was worked out between the two projects.
>
> Please explicitly CC me on any response as I am not subscribed to this mailing
> list.

I don't see why this is a bad use of the inline-asm.  GCC does not
know and is not supposed to know what the string inside the inline-asm
is going to be.  In fact if you have a newer assembler than the
compiler, you could use instructions that GCC does not even know
about.  This is the purpose of inline-asm.  I think it was a bad
design decision on LLVM/clang's part that it would check the assembly
code up front.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski


>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Saleem Abdulrasool
> compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
>

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Richard Sandiford]

Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Saleem Abdulrasool
> <compnerd@compnerd.org> wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> I am sending this at the behest of Renato.  I have been working on the ARM
>> integrated assembler in LLVM and came across an interesting item in the Linux
>> kernel.
>>
>> I am wondering if this is an unstated covenant between the kernel and GCC or
>> simply a clever use of an unintended/undefined behaviour.
>>
>> The Linux kernel uses the *compiler* as a fancy preprocessor to generate a
>> specially crafted assembly file.  This file is then post-processed via sed to
>> generate a header containing constants which is shared across assembly and C
>> sources.
>>
>> In order to clarify the question, I am selecting a particular example and
>> pulling out the relevant bits of the source code below.
>>
>> #define DEFINE(sym, val) asm volatile("\n->" #sym " %0 " #val : : "i" (val))
>>
>> #define __NR_PAGEFLAGS 22
>>
>> void definitions(void) {
>>   DEFINE(NR_PAGEFLAGS, __NR_PAGEFLAGS);
>> }
>>
>> This is then assembled to generate the following:
>>
>> ->NR_PAGEFLAGS #22 __NR_PAGEFLAGS
>>
>> This will later be post-processed to generate:
>>
>> #define NR_PAGELAGS 22 /* __NR_PAGEFLAGS */
>>
>> By using the inline assembler to evaluate (constant) expressions into constant
>> values and then emit that using a special identifier (->) is a fairly clever
>> trick.  This leads to my question: is this just use of an unintentional
>> "feature" or something that was worked out between the two projects.

If the output is being post-processed by sed then maybe you could put
a comment character at the beginning of the line and sed it out?
But I tend to agree with Andrew that for -S output the compiler should
be prepared to accept asm strings that it can't parse, even if the integrated
assembler thinks it understands every instruction.

> I don't see why this is a bad use of the inline-asm.  GCC does not
> know and is not supposed to know what the string inside the inline-asm
> is going to be.  In fact if you have a newer assembler than the
> compiler, you could use instructions that GCC does not even know
> about.

Yeah, FWIW, I agree this is a valid use of inline asm.  The use of volatile
in a reachable part of definitions() means that the asm (and thus the
asm string) must be kept if definitions() is kept.

I doubt the idea was agreed with GCC developers because no GCC changes were
needed to use inline asm this way.

> This is the purpose of inline-asm.  I think it was a bad
> design decision on LLVM/clang's part that it would check the assembly
> code up front.

Being able to parse it is a useful feature.  E.g. it means you can get an
accurate byte length for the asm, which is something that we otherwise
have to guess by multiplying the number of lines by a constant factor.
(And that's wrong for MIPS assembly macros, unless you use a very
conservative constant factor.)

I agree that having an unrecognised asm shouldn't be a hard error until
assembly time though.  Saleem, is the problem that this is being rejected
earlier?

Thanks,
Richard

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Renato Golin]

On 19 February 2014 11:58, Richard Sandiford
<rsandifo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> I agree that having an unrecognised asm shouldn't be a hard error until
> assembly time though.  Saleem, is the problem that this is being rejected
> earlier?

Hi Andrew, Richard,

Thanks for your reviews! We agree that we should actually just ignore
the contents until object emission.

Just for context, one of the reasons why we enabled inline assembly
checks is for some obscure cases when the snippet changes the
instructions set (arm -> thumb) and the rest of the function becomes
garbage. Our initial implementation was to always emit .arm/.thumb
after *any* inline assembly, which would become a nop in the worst
case. But since we had easy access to the assembler, we thought: "why
not?".

The idea is now to try to parse the snippet for cases like .arm/.thumb
but only emit a warning IFF -Wbad-inline-asm (or whatever) is set (and
not to make it on by default), otherwise, ignore. We're hoping our
assembler will be able to cope with the multiple levels of indirection
automagically. ;)

Thanks again!
--renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Andrew Pinski]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin@linaro.org> wrote:
> On 19 February 2014 11:58, Richard Sandiford
> <rsandifo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>> I agree that having an unrecognised asm shouldn't be a hard error until
>> assembly time though.  Saleem, is the problem that this is being rejected
>> earlier?
>
> Hi Andrew, Richard,
>
> Thanks for your reviews! We agree that we should actually just ignore
> the contents until object emission.
>
> Just for context, one of the reasons why we enabled inline assembly
> checks is for some obscure cases when the snippet changes the
> instructions set (arm -> thumb) and the rest of the function becomes
> garbage. Our initial implementation was to always emit .arm/.thumb
> after *any* inline assembly, which would become a nop in the worst
> case. But since we had easy access to the assembler, we thought: "why
> not?".

With the unified assembly format, you should not need those
.arm/.thumb and in fact emitting them can make things even worse.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski


>
> The idea is now to try to parse the snippet for cases like .arm/.thumb
> but only emit a warning IFF -Wbad-inline-asm (or whatever) is set (and
> not to make it on by default), otherwise, ignore. We're hoping our
> assembler will be able to cope with the multiple levels of indirection
> automagically. ;)
>
> Thanks again!
> --renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Renato Golin]

On 19 February 2014 23:19, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> wrote:
> With the unified assembly format, you should not need those
> .arm/.thumb and in fact emitting them can make things even worse.

If only we could get rid or all pre-UAL inline assembly on the planet... :)

The has been the only reason why we added support for those in our
assembler, because GAS supports them and people still use (or have
legacy code they won't change).

If the binutils folks (and you guys) are happy to start seriously
de-phasing pre-UAL support, I'd be more than happy to do so on our
end. Do you think I should start that conversation on the binutils
list?

Maybe a new serious compulsory warning, to start?

cheers,
--renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Ramana Radhakrishnan]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:19 PM, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin@linaro.org> wrote:
>> On 19 February 2014 11:58, Richard Sandiford
>> <rsandifo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>> I agree that having an unrecognised asm shouldn't be a hard error until
>>> assembly time though.  Saleem, is the problem that this is being rejected
>>> earlier?
>>
>> Hi Andrew, Richard,
>>
>> Thanks for your reviews! We agree that we should actually just ignore
>> the contents until object emission.
>>
>> Just for context, one of the reasons why we enabled inline assembly
>> checks is for some obscure cases when the snippet changes the
>> instructions set (arm -> thumb) and the rest of the function becomes
>> garbage.

The current behaviour is that when the compiler generates code for
Thumb1 and Thumb2 we switch back to the appropriate state after inline
assembler is emitted. We don't switch back to ARM state on the (fairly
robust) assumption that most inline assembler is written in ARM state.

In any case when users are switching ARM and Thumb states, they need
to be careful anyway to make sure that the *machine* is going to get
back to the *correct* state and having a screen full of possibly
meaningless compile time errors may not be the most productive. FTR
this is to be the motivation behind such a change based on a
conversation with rearnsha.


>> Our initial implementation was to always emit .arm/.thumb
>> after *any* inline assembly, which would become a nop in the worst
>> case. But since we had easy access to the assembler, we thought: "why
>> not?".

.arm / .thumb directives should not assemble to any instruction least
of all nop. You mean ignored here :).

>
> With the unified assembly format, you should not need those
> .arm/.thumb and in fact emitting them can make things even worse.

Why ? Care to explain when and how it is worse ?

UAL makes no reference to the actual assembler directives required
which is (assembler) implementation dependent. It is purely a grammar
for the instructions in the assembly language and doesn't attempt to
standardize assembler directives which would have evolved differently
over time and different assemblers. How do you otherwise tell the
assembler whether to assemble for ARM state or Thumb instructions ?

regards
Ramana


>
> Thanks,
> Andrew Pinski
>
>
>>
>> The idea is now to try to parse the snippet for cases like .arm/.thumb
>> but only emit a warning IFF -Wbad-inline-asm (or whatever) is set (and
>> not to make it on by default), otherwise, ignore. We're hoping our
>> assembler will be able to cope with the multiple levels of indirection
>> automagically. ;)
>>
>> Thanks again!
>> --renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Renato Golin]

On 20 February 2014 10:11, Ramana Radhakrishnan
<ramana.gcc@googlemail.com> wrote:
> The current behaviour is that when the compiler generates code for
> Thumb1 and Thumb2 we switch back to the appropriate state after inline
> assembler is emitted. We don't switch back to ARM state on the (fairly
> robust) assumption that most inline assembler is written in ARM state.

We went one step further (possibly unnecessarily) and we check what's
the current state before going into inline asm and always emit the
correct code directive afterwards.

We're changing it back from the bad decision to validate inline
assembly (my fault!) in -S mode.


> In any case when users are switching ARM and Thumb states, they need
> to be careful anyway to make sure that the *machine* is going to get
> back to the *correct* state and having a screen full of possibly
> meaningless compile time errors may not be the most productive.

Maybe it'd be better to have fixed the error reporting in the first place. ;)


> .arm / .thumb directives should not assemble to any instruction least
> of all nop. You mean ignored here :).

Yes. ;)

cheers,
--renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Richard Earnshaw]

On 19/02/14 23:19, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin@linaro.org> wrote:
>> On 19 February 2014 11:58, Richard Sandiford
>> <rsandifo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>> I agree that having an unrecognised asm shouldn't be a hard error until
>>> assembly time though.  Saleem, is the problem that this is being rejected
>>> earlier?
>>
>> Hi Andrew, Richard,
>>
>> Thanks for your reviews! We agree that we should actually just ignore
>> the contents until object emission.
>>
>> Just for context, one of the reasons why we enabled inline assembly
>> checks is for some obscure cases when the snippet changes the
>> instructions set (arm -> thumb) and the rest of the function becomes
>> garbage. Our initial implementation was to always emit .arm/.thumb
>> after *any* inline assembly, which would become a nop in the worst
>> case. But since we had easy access to the assembler, we thought: "why
>> not?".
> 
> With the unified assembly format, you should not need those
> .arm/.thumb and in fact emitting them can make things even worse.
> 

Nonsense.  If an inline assembly statement changed the state and didn't
put it back again, then all hell could break loose afterwards, including
getting bogus error messages out of the assembler that would appear to
the user as bugs in the compiler.  Also not all instructions have duals
in the other instruction set (eg. ORN in thumb has no dual in ARM and
RSB has no dual in thumb).

Furthermore, GCC has to understand some things about inline assembly in
order to get literal pool placement (and in Thumb1 branch ranges)
correct.  It has to assume that an inline assembly block generates no
more than 4 bytes of code per statement in the assembly (so .size
<some-large-number>) is certainly going to cause problems.

Inline assembly can't be an entirely opaque blob.

R.

> Thanks,
> Andrew Pinski
> 
> 
>>
>> The idea is now to try to parse the snippet for cases like .arm/.thumb
>> but only emit a warning IFF -Wbad-inline-asm (or whatever) is set (and
>> not to make it on by default), otherwise, ignore. We're hoping our
>> assembler will be able to cope with the multiple levels of indirection
>> automagically. ;)
>>
>> Thanks again!
>> --renato
> 

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Ramana Radhakrishnan]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:26 PM, Renato Golin <renato.golin@linaro.org> wrote:
> On 19 February 2014 23:19, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> wrote:
>> With the unified assembly format, you should not need those
>> .arm/.thumb and in fact emitting them can make things even worse.
>
> If only we could get rid or all pre-UAL inline assembly on the planet... :)
> The has been the only reason why we added support for those in our
> assembler, because GAS supports them and people still use (or have
> legacy code they won't change).


It's not really because GAS supports it, but there exists a large body
of code out there which uses inline assembler with pre-UAL syntax. I'm
not sure people will appreciate a blanket break in one version of the
toolchain and especially when people could quite easily mix and match
between compiler versions and binutils versions. Granted the benefits
of moving to UAL.

Before anything else the compiler needs to be fixed and there are some
corner cases to deal with build attributes especially for Thumb1 in
the assembler before we can starting thinking about deprecating
pre-UAL syntax.

Currently we only put out UAL syntax for Thumb2 integer instructions
and Neon/ Advanced SIMD instructions. Switching ARM state to UAL is
trivial, VFP a little bit more work and Thumb1 a bit harder as you may
need a more up to date GAS with some fixes. We also need a command
line switch (and maybe a pragma) in GCC to put out a .syntax divided
at the entry to and exit from an inline assembler block to allow folks
to transition their inline assembler code, all of which as you can
imagine is not rocket science but needs diligent rework. It may be of
interest for 4.9 + 1 = (4.10 /5.0) in GCC and the next binutils
revision.

Ripping out pre-UAL support from GAS is a different story and will
take quite a few more years, empirical evidence shows that it took us
quite a few years to get rid of FPA support in the compiler and I
don't think it's fully gone from the assembler.  We'll remain stuck
with pre-UAL syntax in the GNU Tools world for quite a while IMNSHO.

Adding the warning by default to GAS is just part of the solution.

regards
Ramana

>
> cheers,
> --renato

Re: ARM inline assembly usage in Linux kernel

[Renato Golin]

On 20 February 2014 12:59, Ramana Radhakrishnan
<ramana.gcc@googlemail.com> wrote:
> It's not really because GAS supports it, but there exists a large body
> of code out there which uses inline assembler with pre-UAL syntax. I'm
> not sure people will appreciate a blanket break in one version of the
> toolchain and especially when people could quite easily mix and match
> between compiler versions and binutils versions.

Hi Ramana,

I agree, I didn't mean it was GAS' fault.


> Before anything else the compiler needs to be fixed and there are some
> corner cases to deal with build attributes especially for Thumb1 in
> the assembler before we can starting thinking about deprecating
> pre-UAL syntax.

Absolutely. But there needs to be an interest in the GNU community to
drive these changes forward. In LLVM we're very much pro-UAL and it
took us quite a lot of convincing to support pre-UAL syntax in the
*parser only*, but we'll never generate it ourselves. Everything we
generate is (or should be) UAL.


> It may be of
> interest for 4.9 + 1 = (4.10 /5.0) in GCC and the next binutils
> revision.

If people are really interested, I can start the ball rolling in the
binutils list.


> Adding the warning by default to GAS is just part of the solution.

It'll only be the second step, yes, with the first one being to fix
the remaining ugly bugs. There will be many more...

cheers,
--renato