Re: reordering of trapping operations and volatile

[Marc Glisse <marc.glisse@inria.fr>]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2022, Martin Uecker via Gcc wrote:

> Am Samstag, den 08.01.2022, 13:41 +0100 schrieb Richard Biener:
>> On January 8, 2022 9:32:24 AM GMT+01:00, Martin Uecker <ma.uecker@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Richard,
>
> thank you for your quick response!
>
>>> I have a question regarding reodering of volatile
>>> accesses and trapping operations. My initial
>>> assumption (and  hope) was that compilers take
>>> care to avoid creating traps that are incorrectly
>>> ordered relative to observable behavior.
>>>
>>> I had trouble finding examples, and my cursory
>>> glace at the code seemed to confirm that GCC
>>> carefully avoids this.  But then someone showed
>>> me this example, where this can happen in GCC:
>>>
>>>
>>> volatile int x;
>>>
>>> int foo(int a, int b, _Bool store_to_x)
>>> {
>>>  if (!store_to_x)
>>>    return a / b;
>>>  x = b;
>>>  return a / b;
>>> }
>>>
>>>
>>> https://godbolt.org/z/vq3r8vjxr
>>>
>>> In this example a division is hoisted
>>> before the volatile store. (the division
>>> by zero which could trap is UB, of course).
>>>
>>> As Martin Sebor pointed out this is done
>>> as part of redundancy elimination
>>> in tree-ssa-pre.c and that this might
>>> simply be an oversight (and could then be
>>> fixed with a small change).
>>>
>>> Could you clarify whether such reordering
>>> is intentional and could be exploited in
>>> general also in other optimizations or
>>> confirm that this is an oversight that
>>> affects only this specific case?
>>>
>>> If this is intentional, are there examples
>>> where this is important for optimization?
>>
>> In general there is no data flow information that
>> prevents traps from being reordered with respect
>> to volatile accesses.
>
> Yes, although I think potentially trapping ops
> are not moved before calls (as this would be
> incorrect).  So do you think it would be feasable
> to prevent this for volatile too?
>
>> The specific case could be
>> easily mitigated in PRE. Another case would be
>>
>> A = c / d;
>> X = 1;
>> If (use_a)
>>   Bar (a);
>>
>> Where we'd sink a across x into the guarded Bb I suspect.
>
> Yes. Related example:
>
> https://godbolt.org/z/5WGhadre3
>
> volatile int x;
> void bar(int a);
>
> void foo(int c, int d)
> {
>  int a = c / d;
>  x = 1;
>  if (d)
>    bar(a);
> }
>
> foo:
>        mov     DWORD PTR x[rip], 1
>        test    esi, esi
>        jne     .L4
>        ret
> .L4:
>        mov     eax, edi
>        cdq
>        idiv    esi
>        mov     edi, eax
>        jmp     bar
>
>
> It would be nice to prevent this too, although
> I am less concerned about this direction, as
> the UB has already happened so there is not
> much we could guarantee about this anyway.
>
> In the other case, it could affect correct
> code before the trap.

-fnon-call-exceptions helps with the first testcase but not with the 
second one. I don't know if that's by accident, but the flag seems 
possibly relevant.

-- 
Marc Glisse