Quote from http://eel.is/c++draft/expr.add#4:
4 When an expression J that has integral type is added to or subtracted from an expression P of pointer type, the result has the type of P. (4.1) If P evaluates to a null pointer value and J evaluates to 0, the result is a null pointer value. (4.2) Otherwise, if P points to an array element i of an array object x with n elements ([dcl.array]), the expressions P + J and J + P (where J has the value j) point to the (possibly-hypothetical) array element i+j of x if 0≤i+j≤n and the expression P - J points to the (possibly-hypothetical) array element i−j of x if 0≤i−j≤n. (4.3) Otherwise, the behavior is undefined.
Therefore, as per the standard, applying non-zero offset to nullptr
(or making non-nullptr a nullptr, by subtracting pointer's integral value
from the pointer itself) is undefined behavior. (*if* nullptr is not defined,
i.e. e.g. -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks was *not* specified.)
To make things more fun, in C (6.5.6p8), applying *any* offset to null pointer
is undefined, although Clang front-end pessimizes the code by not lowering
that info,so this UB is "harmless".
Since rL369789 (D66608 [InstCombine] icmp eq/ne (gep inbounds P, Idx..), null -> icmp eq/ne P, null)
LLVM middle-end uses those guarantees for transformations.
If the source contains such UB's, said code may now be miscompiled.
Such miscompilations were already observed:
- https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20190826/687838.html
- https://github.com/google/filament/pull/1566
Surprisingly, UBSan does not catch those issues
... until now. This diff teaches UBSan about these UB's.
getelementpointer inbounds is a pretty frequent instruction,
so this does have a measurable impact on performance;
I've addressed most of the obvious missing folds (and thus decreased the performance impact by ~5%),
and then re-performed some performance measurements using my RawSpeed benchmark:
(all measurements done with LLVM ToT, the sanitizer never fired.)
- no sanitization vs. existing check: average +21.62% slowdown
- existing check vs. check after this patch: average 22.04% slowdown
- no sanitization vs. this patch: average 48.42% slowdown
In C, even adding 0 to a null pointer is undefined. Did this change in C17?