Currently undef is used as a don’t-care vector when constructing a vector using a series of insertelement.
However, this is problematic because undef isn’t undefined enough.
Especially, a sequence of insertelement can be optimized to shufflevector, but using undef as its placeholder makes shufflevector a poison-blocking instruction because undef cannot be optimized to poison.
This makes a few straightforward optimizations incorrect, such as:
; https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44185
define <4 x float> @insert_not_undef_shuffle_translate_commute(float %x, <4 x float> %y, <4 x float> %q) {
%xv = insertelement <4 x float> %q, float %x, i32 2
%r = shufflevector <4 x float> %y, <4 x float> %xv, <4 x i32> { 0, 6, 2, undef }
ret <4 x float> %r ; %r[3] is undef
}
=>
define <4 x float> @insert_not_undef_shuffle_translate_commute(float %x, <4 x float> %y, <4 x float> %q) {
%r = insertelement <4 x float> %y, float %x, i32 1
ret <4 x float> %r ; %r[3] = %y[3], incorrect if %y[3] = poison
}
Transformation doesn't verify!
ERROR: Target is more poisonous than sourceI’d like to suggest
- Using poison as insertelement’s placeholder value (IRBuilder::CreateVectorSplat should be patched too)
- Updating shufflevector’s semantics to return poison element if mask is undef
Note that poison is currently lowered into UNDEF in SelDag, so codegen part is okay.
m_Undef() matches PoisonValue as well, so existing optimizations will still fire.
The only concern is hidden miscompilations that will go incorrect when poison constant is given.
A conservative way is copying all tests having insertelement undef & replacing it with insertelement poison & run Alive2 on it, but it will create many tests and people won’t like it. :(
Instead, I’ll simply locally maintain the tests and run Alive2.
If there is any bug found, I’ll report it.
Relevant links: https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43958 , http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-November/137242.html
undef -> poison