Date:   Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:05:13 +0200
From:   Dávid Bolvanský <david.bolvansky@...il.com>
To:     Arvind Sankar <nivedita@...m.mit.edu>
Cc:     Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk>,
        Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@...gle.com>,
        Eli Friedman <efriedma@...cinc.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
        Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@...nel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        Michal Marek <michal.lkml@...kovi.net>,
        Linux Kbuild mailing list <linux-kbuild@...r.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
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        Marco Elver <elver@...gle.com>,
        Vamshi K Sthambamkadi <vamshi.k.sthambamkadi@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] -ffreestanding/-fno-builtin-* patches

Yeah, gcc is doing weird things here : (

It is kinda sad that same flag does different things with gcc and clang.



> Dňa 20. 8. 2020 o 19:56 užívateľ Arvind Sankar <nivedita@...m.mit.edu> napísal:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 04:56:02PM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
>>> On 18/08/2020 23.41, Arvind Sankar wrote:
>>> 
>>> Note that -fno-builtin-foo seems to mean slightly different things in
>>> clang and gcc. From experimentation, clang will neither optimize a call
>>> to foo, nor perform an optimization that introduces a call to foo. gcc
>>> will avoid optimizing calls to foo, but it can still generate new calls
>>> to foo while optimizing something else. Which means that
>>> -fno-builtin-{bcmp,stpcpy} only solves things for clang, not gcc. It's
>>> just that gcc doesn't seem to have implemented those optimizations.
>>> 
>> 
>> I think it's more than that. I've always read gcc's documentation
>> 
>> '-fno-builtin'
>> '-fno-builtin-FUNCTION'
>>     Don't recognize built-in functions that do not begin with
>>     '__builtin_' as prefix. ...
>> 
>>     GCC normally generates special code to handle certain built-in
>>     functions more efficiently; for instance, calls to 'alloca' may
>>     become single instructions which adjust the stack directly, and
>>     calls to 'memcpy' may become inline copy loops.
>>     ...
>> 
>> to mean exactly that observed above and nothing more, i.e. that
>> -fno-builtin-foo merely means that gcc stops treating a call of a
>> function named foo to mean a call to a function implementing the
>> standard function by that name (and hence allows it to e.g. replace a
>> memcpy(d, s, 1) by byte load+store). It does not mean to prevent
>> emitting calls to foo, and I don't think it ever will - it's a bit sad
>> that clang has chosen to interpret these options differently.
> 
> That documentation is misleading, as it also goes on to say:
> "...nor can you change the behavior of the functions by linking with a
> different library"
> which implies that you _can_ change the behavior if you use the option,
> and which is what your "i.e." is saying as well.
> 
> My point is that this is not completely true: in gcc, foo by default is
> defined to be __builtin_foo, and -fno-builtin-foo simply removes this
> definition. So the effect is just that calls to foo in the original
> source will be left alone.
> 
> But in order for an optimization that introduces a new call to foo to be
> valid, foo _must_ have standard semantics: strchr(s,'\0') is not s +
> strlen(s) unless strlen has standard semantics. This is an oversight in
> gcc's optimizations: it converts to s + __builtin_strlen(s), which then
> (normally) becomes s + strlen(s).
> 
> Check out this horror: https://godbolt.org/z/a1r9fK
> 
> Clang will disable this optimization if -fno-builtin-strlen is
> specified.
> 
> Clang's interpretation is more useful for embedded, since you can use
> -fno-builtin-foo and avoid calling __builtin_foo directly, and be
> guaranteed that there will be no calls to foo that you didn't write
> explicitly (outside of memcpy/memset/memcmp). In this case you are free
> to implement foo with non-standard semantics, or avoid implementing it
> altogether, and be reasonably confident that it will all work.
> 
>> 
>> Thinking out load, it would be useful if both compilers grew
>> 
>>  -fassume-provided-std-foo
>> 
>> and
>> 
>>  -fno-assume-provided-std-foo
>> 
>> options to tell the compiler that a function named foo with standard
>> semantics can be assumed (or not) to be provided by the execution
>> environment; i.e. one half of what -f(no-)builtin-foo apparently does
>> for clang currently.
> 
> Not following: -fno-assume-provided-std-foo sounds like it would have
> exactly the same semantics as Clang's -fno-builtin-foo, except maybe in
> addition it should cause the compiler to error on seeing __builtin_foo
> if it can't implement that without calling foo.
> 
>> 
>> And yes, the positive -fbuiltin-foo would also be quite useful in order
>> to get the compiler to recognize a few important functions (memcpy,
>> memcmp) while using -ffreestanding (or just plain -fno-builtin) to tell
>> it to avoid assuming anything about most std functions - I've worked on
>> a VxWorks target where snprintf() didn't have the correct "return what
>> would be written" semantics but rather behaved like the kernel's
>> non-standard scnprintf(), and who knows what other odd quirks that libc had.
>> 
>> Rasmus

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