Skip to content
  • Hal Finkel's avatar
    Add scoped-noalias metadata · 9414665a
    Hal Finkel authored
    This commit adds scoped noalias metadata. The primary motivations for this
    feature are:
      1. To preserve noalias function attribute information when inlining
      2. To provide the ability to model block-scope C99 restrict pointers
    
    Neither of these two abilities are added here, only the necessary
    infrastructure. In fact, there should be no change to existing functionality,
    only the addition of new features. The logic that converts noalias function
    parameters into this metadata during inlining will come in a follow-up commit.
    
    What is added here is the ability to generally specify noalias memory-access
    sets. Regarding the metadata, alias-analysis scopes are defined similar to TBAA
    nodes:
    
    !scope0 = metadata !{ metadata !"scope of foo()" }
    !scope1 = metadata !{ metadata !"scope 1", metadata !scope0 }
    !scope2 = metadata !{ metadata !"scope 2", metadata !scope0 }
    !scope3 = metadata !{ metadata !"scope 2.1", metadata !scope2 }
    !scope4 = metadata !{ metadata !"scope 2.2", metadata !scope2 }
    
    Loads and stores can be tagged with an alias-analysis scope, and also, with a
    noalias tag for a specific scope:
    
    ... = load %ptr1, !alias.scope !{ !scope1 }
    ... = load %ptr2, !alias.scope !{ !scope1, !scope2 }, !noalias !{ !scope1 }
    
    When evaluating an aliasing query, if one of the instructions is associated
    with an alias.scope id that is identical to the noalias scope associated with
    the other instruction, or is a descendant (in the scope hierarchy) of the
    noalias scope associated with the other instruction, then the two memory
    accesses are assumed not to alias.
    
    Note that is the first element of the scope metadata is a string, then it can
    be combined accross functions and translation units. The string can be replaced
    by a self-reference to create globally unqiue scope identifiers.
    
    [Note: This overview is slightly stylized, since the metadata nodes really need
    to just be numbers (!0 instead of !scope0), and the scope lists are also global
    unnamed metadata.]
    
    Existing noalias metadata in a callee is "cloned" for use by the inlined code.
    This is necessary because the aliasing scopes are unique to each call site
    (because of possible control dependencies on the aliasing properties). For
    example, consider a function: foo(noalias a, noalias b) { *a = *b; } that gets
    inlined into bar() { ... if (...) foo(a1, b1); ... if (...) foo(a2, b2); } --
    now just because we know that a1 does not alias with b1 at the first call site,
    and a2 does not alias with b2 at the second call site, we cannot let inlining
    these functons have the metadata imply that a1 does not alias with b2.
    
    llvm-svn: 213864
    9414665a
Loading