On 6/7/21 9:30 AM, Richard Biener via Gcc-patches wrote:
On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 12:10 PM Aldy Hernandez via Gcc-patches
<gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
The substitute_and_fold_engine which evrp uses is expecting symbolics
from value_of_expr / value_on_edge / etc, which ranger does not provide.
In some cases, these provide important folding cues, as in the case of
aliases for pointers. For example, legacy evrp may return [&foo, &foo]
for the value of "bar" where bar is on an edge where bar == &foo, or
when bar has been globally set to &foo. This information is then used
by the subst & fold engine to propagate the known value of bar.
Currently this is a major source of discrepancies between evrp and
ranger. Of the 284 cases legacy evrp is getting over ranger, 237 are
for pointer equality as discussed above.
This patch implements a context aware points-to class which
ranger-evrp can use to query what a pointer is currently pointing to.
With it, we reduce the 284 cases legacy evrp is getting to 47.
The API for the points-to analyzer is the following:
class points_to_analyzer
{
public:
points_to_analyzer (gimple_ranger *r);
~points_to_analyzer ();
void enter (basic_block);
void leave (basic_block);
void visit_stmt (gimple *stmt);
tree get_points_to (tree name) const;
...
};
The enter(), leave(), and visit_stmt() methods are meant to be called
from a DOM walk. At any point throughout the walk, one can call
get_points_to() to get whatever an SSA is pointing to.
If this class is useful to others, we could place it in a more generic
location.
Tested on x86-64 Linux with a regular bootstrap/tests and by comparing
EVRP folds over ranger before and after this patch.
Hmm, but why call it "points-to" - when I look at the implementation
it's really about equivalences. Thus,
if (var1_2 == var2_3)
could be handled the same way. Also "points-to" implies (to me)
that &p[1] and &p[2] point to the same object but your points-to
is clearly tracking equivalences only.
So maybe at least rename it to pointer_equiv_analyzer? ISTR
propagating random (symbolic) equivalences has issues.
Yeah, pointer_equiv is probably more accurate. This is purely for cases
where we know a pointer points to something that isn't an ssa_name.
Eventually this is likely to be subsumed into a pointer_range object,
but unlikely in this release.
I don't think this is actually doing the propagation though... It tracks
that a_2 currently points to &foo.. and returns that to either
simplifier or folder thru value_of_expr(). Presumably it is up to them
to determine whether the tree expression passed back is safe to
propagate. Is there any attempt in EVRP to NOT set the range of
something to [&foo, &foo] under some conditions? This is what the
change amounts to. Ranger would just return a range of [1, +INF], and
value_of_expr would therefore return NULL. This allows value_of to
return &foo in these conditions. Aldy, did you see any other checks in
the vr-values code?
Things like if (var1_2 == var2_3) deal with just ssa-names and will be
handled by an ssa_name relation oracle. It just treats equivalencies
like a a slightly special kind of relation. Im just about to bring that
forward this week.
Andrew
