LangRef: Attempt to formulate some rules for addrspacecast

[arsenm]

Summary

If agreed, some work will be needed to comply with these rules.

[theraven]

Thanks for working on this, it's a seriously underspecified part of LLVM.

docs/LangRef.rst

9704

What does 'is legal' actually mean? For example, if I have a 32-bit VA space and a 64-bit VA space in the same process with a subset of the program understanding only one and a shim layer understanding both, then the cast from 32-bit to 64-bit will always succeed but the converse cast is always a statically valid operation but may dynamically fail (and the failure case may be to return null).

9705

Does this not preclude using address space casts to make pointers visible to GC (or, conversely, to notify the GC that a pointer has escaped)? I think we may need to define what 'capture' means in this context. I believe the goal of this is to state that the compiler is free to elide address space casts with no uses?

9714

I believe that this holds only if both address spaces are permutations. Again, the simple 32/64-bit case, a round trip starting in the 32-bit world is always possible, but the converse does not apply.

[arsenm]

docs/LangRef.rst

9704

I was thinking legal means a dereferencable result. If you were to access the result when the cast failed, it would be undefined

9705

I'm trying to reiterate that this is not an operation that touches memory in any way. We do allow addrspacecasts in constant expressions, and they can't trap. Elision should be OK.

The intent is addrspacecast has stronger aliasing properties than a ptrtoint/inttoptr pair, which was part of the original intent of adding a new instruction.

9714

This probably needs an additional constraint that the result was also dereferencable / legal as stated before. The goal is it should be legal to insert new addrspacecasts back to the source addrspace in certain contexts. The interesting ones are cases where you are dereferencing the pointer anyway, so it would have been undefined if the cast failed

[arsenm]

Say dereferencable instead of legal

[theraven]

Apparently I forgot to hit submit on the comments I made yesterday, sorry!

docs/LangRef.rst

9704

I'm happy with that clarification. We probably want to explicitly talk about dynamic failure for addrspacecast somewhere in this documentation.

9705

Makes sense, we probably want to clarify what capturing means from the perspective of allowed transforms here. It may be that an addrsoacecast has static side effects (if that's a valid term) causing some extra metadata to be emitted about roots on the stack or in registers, for example, but the compiler is free to move address space casts across other operations and to elide them.

In the CHERI case, we do have one operation that it is not safe to move address space casts across (writes to the default data capability change the meaning of the current address space), but it's also not safe to reorder loads / stores across that and so we probably need to add an explicit address space change barrier intrinsic for things like that.

9714

I think we need to be very careful about eliding user-expected trapping behaviour here. CHERI has similar behaviour, but consider a simple 32/64-bit example where:

• 32-bit pointers are AS0
• 64-bit pointers are AS1
• Cast from 32-bit to 64-bit is a zero extension (always valid)
• Cast from 64-bit to 32-bit is a truncation, equality test, and conditional move of 0 on failure, so an addrspacecast from AS1 to AS0 gives either a valid result or null.

If I have a sequence of:

%0 is some AS1 pointer
%1 casts to AS0
%2 loads from %1

This would be expected to trap, but with the text as written it would be valid to elide %1 and have %2 be a load from %0. This is probably not what the programmer expected. Would you need to mark one of these as non-integral to achieve those guarantees? Or have some ordering of permissiveness? In this scenario, it's fine to do the elision the other way around:

%0 is some AS0 pointer
%1 casts to AS1
%2 loads from %1

In this version, eliding %1 and making %2 load from %0 is totally fine. I think we really need to model three kinds of cast:

• Ones that are always valid (statically known)
• Ones that are always invalid (statically known)
• Ones that are sometimes valid (dynamically known)

I'd suggest making the last case the default and adding metadata for the first two. Front ends generally know which of these are the case and can add the metadata and some later analyses may be able to once some more is known about the values. Optimisers are then free to elide any always-valid addrspacecast instructions. If the metadata is accidentally dropped then that's also fine.

In the CHERI case, an AS0 to AS200 cast is always valid (and clang could be taught to add the metadata). An AS200 to AS0 cast is always valid if you can statically prove that it was the result of a cast in the opposite direction, or if it came from a specific allocator. Most AS0 to AS200 casts are followed by a call to an intrinsic that sets bounds / permissions, and this is the only use of the addrspacecast instruction, which prohibits these optimisations (correctly).

[arsenm]

docs/LangRef.rst

9714

Loading from the failed cast would be undefined behavior, so transforming the load and avoiding the trap should be legal. I wouldn't expect this to be any different from the compiler eliminating the a trap from a store to NULL. I do think this is an argument for not allowing changing the address space of volatile operations (see D63401).

[arsenm]

Add some notes about changing the address space of accesses

[arsenm]

ping

[jdoerfert]

docs/LangRef.rst

2713

I'd change the last sentence, maybe as shown below, but the meaning is fine.

"In general, "null-pointers" have to be assumed dereferenceable in non-zero address spaces."

dereferencable -> dereferenceable

2720

For a non-volatile access, if an object can be proven accessible through a pointer with a different address space, the access may be modified to use that address space.

I'm not happy with this wording,... but I can't quite put my finger on it.

9706

same memory location.

Is it necessarily the same memory location or the same "logical" memory location? This is an honest question.

[theraven]

docs/LangRef.rst

2713

I am also unhappy with this as a claim. null pointers should always be non-dereferenceable. The semantics of inttoptr of 0 may not yield null for a given address space and the semantics of ptrtoint of null may not yield the integer 0, but the definition of a null pointer is a guaranteed non-dereferenceable pointer.

[arsenm]

docs/LangRef.rst

2713

I'm unhappy with the claim, but I'm also unhappy with the state of null in llvm. "i8 addrspace(N)* null" is always interpreted as bit pattern 0. I would like to fix this by defining the invalid pointer value in the datalayout, and remove all special treatment of addrspace(0). As-is I don't think there is a way to describe a constant, known-invalid/null pointer in the IR.

[arsenm]

Fix spelling. Rephrase and move volatile note to volatile section

[arsenm]

ping

[arsenm]

ping

[arsenm]

Ping

[arsenm]

ping

[arsenm]

ping

[jdoerfert]

Sorry for the delay.

I have a few more notes/questions.

docs/LangRef.rst

2226

Why, "In general,"? Do we have exceptions?

2718

Again, why "possible" and "may". Don't we "just" want to say "Exceptions apply for `volatile` operations"?

9714

I'm confused by:

both source and destination address spaces are :ref:integral pointers <nointptrtype>

why are address spaces pointer types (or am I reading this wrong)?

Do we want "is assumed" and "should"? As above, that sounds like the are alternative options.

[anna]

Just chiming in here. We are planning to use addrspacecast for pointer width conversion (32 to 64 bit and vice-versa). Does not change the memory in anyway, i.e. if we lowered the addrspacecast into an IR call, that call could be marked argmemonly readnone. However, it is *not* a simple sign-extend/truncate either.
I've added some comments inline. Also, I think we have the scope to improve optimizations for addrspacecast at IR level, which is currently limited because different targets have varying lowering for addrspacecast.

Specifically, things like "looking through" an addrspacecast when the source operand of AS is nonnull and noting that the result is nonnull as well (i.e. improvements to isKnownNonZero and computeKnownBits). I was initially leaning towards adding a metadata for special addrspacecast semantics. However, @arsenm mentioned his ideas on adding information in the datalayout, i.e. 0 is a null pointer value for specific addrspaces. The latter may flow nicely with existing optimizations.

docs/LangRef.rst

9704

I believe this by itself is a very good statement/property to add to the langref and Verifier.

9710

This rule allows us to optimize away redundant addrspacecasts.
We should be able to eliminate back-to-back addrspacecast when the source and result are dereferenceable, something like:

%v.32 = addrspacecast i8 addrspace(1)* %v.64 to i8 addrspace(2)*
%v.64.copy = addrspacecast i8 addrspace(2)* to i8 addrspace(1)*

[arsenm]

docs/LangRef.rst

2226

The exceptions would be with target specific knowledge. General IR not considering target semantics must follow this rule

[arsenm]

Apply phrasing suggestions

[jdoerfert]

I think this looks reasonable :)

[efriedma]

volatile restriction seems fine. New addrspace casting rules seem fine.

llvm/docs/LangRef.rst

3047 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

Given we don't define what it means for a pointer to be "null", or promise that such a pointer exists in every address-space, it isn't really meaningful to say that dereferencing null is undefined. We can just drop that whole sentence, I think.

10268 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

"The conversion must have no side effects, and must not capture the value of the pointer."

[nlopes]

llvm/docs/LangRef.rst

3047 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

agreed

3049 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

unless the function is marked with the null_pointer_is_valid attribute

3051 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

uhm, do we want this?
This precludes using two address spaces with different memory protections. I understand why this assumption may be useful for optimization, but not sure we want it.

[arsenm]

Rebase and address comments

llvm/docs/LangRef.rst

3047 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

I can drop the null part here, but I think the important part to note is dereferencing a non-dereferenceable pointer is still undefined behavior in any address space.

I would eventually like to move towards defining the null concept, rather than special casing address space 0.

3051 ↗

(On Diff #270850)

If we know the pointer is to a valid object, does different memory protection really matter? For objects living on the stack, I guess it would make a difference in failure behavior for the stack overflow case.

I don't believe address spaces should be a mechanism for you-must-get-this-memory access type of guarantee, and that's what the point of volatile is (which is why I put this exception here for volatile)

[nlopes]

I like this latest writing. But please wait for another reviewer to make sure I didn't miss smth.

[efriedma]

LGTM

[arsenm]

da137e114eb735dc9e79cb30407bcd03118e8863

[nikic]

llvm/docs/LangRef.rst

3651 ↗

(On Diff #471762)

Backticks should probably end after the attribute name?

docs/LangRef.rst

 The allowed side-effects for volatile accesses are limited.  If a
 non-volatile store to a given address would be legal, a volatile
 operation may modify the memory at that address. A volatile operation
 may not modify any other memory accessible by the module being compiled.
 A volatile operation may not call any code in the current module.
 
 The compiler may assume execution will continue after a volatile operation,
 so operations which modify memory or may have undefined behavior can be
 hoisted past a volatile operation.
 
 IR-level volatile loads and stores cannot safely be optimized into
 llvm.memcpy or llvm.memmove intrinsics even when those intrinsics are
 flagged volatile. Likewise, the backend should never split or merge
 target-legal volatile load/store instructions.
 
 .. admonition:: Rationale
 

 Pointer Type
 """"""""""""
 
 :Overview:
 
 The pointer type is used to specify memory locations. Pointers are
 commonly used to reference objects in memory.
 
-Pointer types may have an optional address space attribute defining the
-numbered address space where the pointed-to object resides. The default
-address space is number zero. The semantics of non-zero address spaces
-are target-specific.
+Pointer types may have an optional address space attribute defining
+the numbered address space where the pointed-to object resides. The
+default address space is number zero. The semantics of non-zero
+address spaces are target-specific. Memory access through an invalid,
+non-dereferencable pointer is undefined behavior in any address
+space. In general pointers with the bit-value 0 are assumed to be
+dereferencable in non-0 address spaces.
+
+For a non-volatile access, if an object can be proven accessible
+through a pointer with a different address space, the access may be
+modified to use that address space. In general, it is not permitted to
+change the address space of a volatile memory access. Different
+address spaces may have different trapping behavior when dereferencing
+an invalid pointer.
 
 Note that LLVM does not permit pointers to void (``void*``) nor does it
 permit pointers to labels (``label*``). Use ``i8*`` instead.
 
 :Syntax:
 
 ::
 

 
 Semantics:
 """"""""""
 
 The '``addrspacecast``' instruction converts the pointer value
 ``ptrval`` to type ``pty2``. It can be a *no-op cast* or a complex
 value modification, depending on the target and the address space
 pair. Pointer conversions within the same address space must be
-performed with the ``bitcast`` instruction. Note that if the address space
-conversion is legal then both result and operand refer to the same memory
-location.
+performed with the ``bitcast`` instruction. Note that if the address
+space conversion produces a dereferencable result then both result and
+operand refer to the same memory location. The conversion must have no
+side effects, or capture the value of the pointer.
+
+If the source is :ref:`poison <poisonvalues>`, the result is
+:ref:`poison <poisonvalues>`.
+
+If the source is not :ref:`poison <poisonvalues>`, and both source and
+destination address spaces are :ref:`integral pointers
+<nointptrtype>`, and the result pointer is dereferencable, the cast is
+assumed to be reversible (i.e. casting the result back to the original
+address space should yield the original bit pattern).
 
 Example:
 """"""""
 
 .. code-block:: llvm
 
       %X = addrspacecast i32* %x to i32 addrspace(1)*    ; yields i32 addrspace(1)*:%x
       %Y = addrspacecast i32 addrspace(1)* %y to i64 addrspace(2)*    ; yields i64 addrspace(2)*:%y