On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 1:59 AM Martin Sebor via Gcc-patches
<gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> To determine the target of a pointer expression and the offset into
> it, the increasingly widely used compute_objsize function traverses
> the IL following the DEF statements of pointer variables, aggregating
> offsets from POINTER_PLUS assignments along the way. It does that
> for many statements that involve pointers, including calls to
> built-in functions and (so far only) accesses to char arrays. When
> a function has many such statements with pointers to the same objects
> but with different offsets, the traversal ends up visiting the same
> pointer assignments repeatedly and unnecessarily.
>
> To avoid this repeated traversal, the attached patch adds the ability
> to cache results obtained in prior calls to the function. The cache
> is optional and only used when enabled.
>
> To exercise the cache I have enabled it for the strlen pass (which
> is probably the heaviest compute_objsize user). That happens to
> resolve PR 97373 which tracks the pass' failure to detect sprintf
> overflowing allocated buffers at a non-constant offset. I thought
> about making this a separate patch but the sprintf/strlen changes
> are completely mechanical so it didn't seem worth the effort.
>
> In the benchmarking I've done the cache isn't a huge win there but
> it does have a measurable difference in the project I'm wrapping up
> where most pointer assignments need to be examined. The space used
> for the cache is negligible on average: fewer than 20 entries per
> Glibc function and about 6 for GCC. The worst case in Glibc is
> 6 thousand entries and 10k in GCC. Since the entries are sizable
> (216 bytes each) the worst case memory consumption can be reduced
> by adding a level of indirection. A further savings can be obtained
> by replacing some of the offset_int members of the entries with
> HOST_WIDE_INT.
>
> The efficiency benefits of the cache should increase further as more
> of the access checking code is integrated into the same pass. This
> should eventually include the checking currently done in the built-in
> expanders.
>
> Tested on x86_64-linux, along with Glibc and Binutils/GDB.
I'm quite sure the objsz pass already has a cache, why not
re-use it instead of piggy-backing another one onto its machinery?
Richard.
> Martin
>
> PS The patch add the new pointer_query class (loosely modeled on
> range_query) to builtins.{h,c}. This should be only temporary,
> until the access checking code is moved into a file (and ultimately
> a pass) of its own.
