Bug 100363 - gcc generating wider load/store than warranted at -O3
Summary: gcc generating wider load/store than warranted at -O3
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: gcc
Classification: Unclassified
Component: tree-optimization (show other bugs)
Version: 10.2.0
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Not yet assigned to anyone
URL:
Keywords: wrong-code
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2021-04-30 20:09 UTC by Vineet Gupta
Modified: 2022-11-14 06:25 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

See Also:
Host:
Target:
Build:
Known to work:
Known to fail:
Last reconfirmed: 2021-04-30 00:00:00


Attachments
test case with an additional nop to annotate codegen (31.02 KB, application/x-compressed-tar)
2021-04-30 20:09 UTC, Vineet Gupta
Details
preprocessed source file (with extra nop annotation) (19.81 KB, application/gzip)
2021-04-30 21:56 UTC, Vineet Gupta
Details
kernel patch as proposed on comment #7 (565 bytes, text/plain)
2021-05-03 17:25 UTC, Vineet Gupta
Details

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Vineet Gupta 2021-04-30 20:09:42 UTC
Created attachment 50722 [details]
test case with an additional nop to annotate codegen

In Linux kernel's initramfs gzip inflate code, an inner copy loop using unsigned short pointers (src/dst) is generated with wider 8 or 16-byte at a time (vs. 2 bytes at a time) causing extra/unintended bytes to be copied - leading to corruption of inflated files on target.

The showed up on upstream v5.6 Linux kernel built for ARC (defaults to -O3). Issue doesn't happen at -O2.

Full test case attached, but the gist of it is:

    lib/zlib_inflate/inffast.c

    if (dist > 2) {
	unsigned short *sfrom;

	sfrom = (unsigned short *)(from);
	loops = len >> 1;
	do
	    *sout++ = *sfrom++;

	while (--loops);
	out = (unsigned char *)sout;
	from = (unsigned char *)sfrom;
    }
    ...

@sfrom and @sout are unsigned short pointers and thus expected to work on 2 bytes. However at -O3 gcc is generating wide loads (8-byte LDD/STD on ARCv2, 16-byte LDR q0 on aarch64.

For aarch64, it seems there's code generated for 16-byte access as well as 2-byte, and I haven't verified if it elides the 16-byte code based on size etc - but the code is generated nonetheless. For ARC 8-byte loop is certainly executed causing bad things as described

The issue was originally seen with mainline gcc 10.2 (again both ARC and aarch64) at -O3 and I can confirm it exists in gcc 9.3 as well.

Attaching preprocessed source file is from ARC linux build (but builds for aarch64 too since non of arch specific functions are used here.
Comment 1 Andrew Pinski 2021-04-30 21:43:52 UTC
The loop gets vectorized, I don't see the problem really.

Also I don't see the preprocessed source.  Can you attach that?

Is the problem that the loads have to be done in 2 bytes always from the hardware?
If so then you need to mark the pointer as volatile.
Comment 2 Andrew Pinski 2021-04-30 21:44:24 UTC
Note in the tar file there is only:
inffast2.s  inffast2.s.aarch64.gcc10.O3  inffast2.s.aarch64.gcc9.O3  inffast2.s.arc.gcc10.O3
Comment 3 Vineet Gupta 2021-04-30 21:56:44 UTC
Created attachment 50723 [details]
preprocessed source file (with extra nop annotation)
Comment 4 Linus Torvalds 2021-04-30 22:02:27 UTC
(In reply to Andrew Pinski from comment #1)
> The loop gets vectorized, I don't see the problem really.


See

    https://github.com/foss-for-synopsys-dwc-arc-processors/toolchain/issues/372

and in particular the comment

   "In the first 8-byte copy, src and dst overlap"

so apparently gcc has decided that they can't overlap, despite the two pointers being literally generated from the same base pointer.

But I don't real arc assembly, so I'll have to take Vineet's word for it.

Vineet, have you been able to generate a smaller test-case?
Comment 5 Andrew Pinski 2021-04-30 22:19:44 UTC
On the trunk, on aarch64:
There should be an aliasing check 

  sfrom_289 = from_176 + 18446744073709551615;
  _871 = _843 + 18446744073709551615;
  _872 = _871 > 6;
  _873 = prephitmp_803 + 2;
  _874 = from_176 + 3;
  _875 = _873 - _874;
  _876 = (sizetype) _875;
  _877 = _876 > 12;
  _878 = _872 & _877;
  if (_878 != 0)
    goto <bb 116>; [80.00%]
  else
    goto <bb 126>; [20.00%]


_873 is the sout


In GCC 10 branch we get something similar:
  sfrom_289 = from_176 + 18446744073709551615;
  _859 = _823 + 18446744073709551615;
  _860 = _859 > 8;
  _861 = prephitmp_783 + 2;
  _862 = from_176 + 3;
  _863 = _861 - _862;
  _864 = (sizetype) _863;
  _865 = _864 > 12;
  _866 = _860 & _865;
  if (_866 != 0)
    goto <bb 116>; [80.00%]
  else
    goto <bb 126>; [20.00%]

But I Notice 8 vs 6 here.
Comment 6 Vineet Gupta 2021-04-30 22:33:23 UTC
(In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #4)
> (In reply to Andrew Pinski from comment #1)
> > The loop gets vectorized, I don't see the problem really.
> 
> 
> See
> 
>    
> https://github.com/foss-for-synopsys-dwc-arc-processors/toolchain/issues/372
> 
> and in particular the comment
> 
>    "In the first 8-byte copy, src and dst overlap"
> 
> so apparently gcc has decided that they can't overlap, despite the two
> pointers being literally generated from the same base pointer.

Exactly:

> But I don't real arc assembly, so I'll have to take Vineet's word for it.

fwiw:
LDD.a [base, off] is 8-byte load with pre-incr : eff addr = base + offset
STD.ab [base, off] is 8-byte store with post-incr: eff addr = base
 

> Vineet, have you been able to generate a smaller test-case?

No I'm afraid not.
Comment 7 Alexander Monakov 2021-05-01 22:54:42 UTC
The github issue has a more relevant code quote:

#ifdef CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS     <-- this is enabled for ARCv2
279:			    PUP(sout) = PUP(sfrom);
#else
			    PUP(sout) = UP_UNALIGNED(sfrom);
#endif


Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while the vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for a 'short'.

It is unsafe to dereference a misaligned pointer. The pointed-to-type must have reduced alignment:

typedef unsigned short u16_u __attribute__((aligned(1)));

u16_u *sout = ...

u16_u *sfrom = (void *)(from - OFF);

(without -ffreestanding, memcpy/memmove is a portable way to express a misaligned access)

https://trust-in-soft.com/blog/2020/04/06/gcc-always-assumes-aligned-pointer-accesses/
Comment 8 Linus Torvalds 2021-05-01 23:09:45 UTC
(In reply to Alexander Monakov from comment #7)
> 
> Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while
> the vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for
> a 'short'.

They absolutely are.

And we build the kernel with -Wno-strict-aliasing exactly to make sure the compiler doesn't think that "oh, I can make aliasing decisions based on type information".

Because we have those kinds of issues all over, and we know which architectures support unaligned loads etc, and all the tricks with "memcpy()" and unions make for entirely unreadable code.

So please fix the aliasing logic to not be type-based when people explicitly tell you not to do that.

Linus
Comment 9 Richard Biener 2021-05-03 07:41:30 UTC
(In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #8)
> (In reply to Alexander Monakov from comment #7)
> > 
> > Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while
> > the vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for
> > a 'short'.
> 
> They absolutely are.
> 
> And we build the kernel with -Wno-strict-aliasing exactly to make sure the
> compiler doesn't think that "oh, I can make aliasing decisions based on type
> information".
> 
> Because we have those kinds of issues all over, and we know which
> architectures support unaligned loads etc, and all the tricks with
> "memcpy()" and unions make for entirely unreadable code.
> 
> So please fix the aliasing logic to not be type-based when people explicitly
> tell you not to do that.
> 
> Linus

Note alignment has nothing to do with strict-aliasing (-fno-strict-aliasing you mean btw).

One thing we do is (I'm not 50% sure this explains the observed issue) assume
that if you have two accesses with type 'short' and they are aligned
according to this type then they will not partly overlap.  Note this has
nothing to do with C strict aliasing rules but is basic pointer math when
you know lower zero bits.

I suggest to try the fix suggested in comment#7 and report back if that
fixes the observed issue.
Comment 10 Linus Torvalds 2021-05-03 16:03:24 UTC
(In reply to Richard Biener from comment #9)
> 
> Note alignment has nothing to do with strict-aliasing (-fno-strict-aliasing
> you mean btw).

I obviously meant -fno-strict-aliasing, yes.

But I think it's actually essentially the same issue, just in a different guise:

> One thing we do is (I'm not 50% sure this explains the observed issue) assume
> that if you have two accesses with type 'short' and they are aligned
> according to this type then they will not partly overlap.  Note this has
> nothing to do with C strict aliasing rules but is basic pointer math when
> you know lower zero bits.

Well, the thing is, you have two situations:

 (a) you can statically see that the two do not alias, because the offset arithmetic is either constant or you have some range logic that can tell that they are sufficiently far apart.

 (b) you can't.

Now, everybody is ok with the static aliasing situation in (a). If you can tell that two addresses don't alias, your'e done, they are independent, there's no question  about it.

But that's not the situation here. So we're in (b). And what I find personally so annoying is that gcc has actually *done* that distance check, but apparently intentionally done it badly based on type information.

And the reason I think this is similar to -fno-strict-aliasing is that it's that same (b) case, and it looks like a very similar "do a bad job of doing actual run-time alias analysis based on type information".

It seems to be literally an off-by-one error, not because it generates better code, but because the compiler has decided to pointlessly make a bad range comparison based on type.

But I've never worked with the gcc IR dumps, so Andrew Pinski's debug output in #c5 doesn't actually make me go "ahh, there". Maybe it's that 8 vs 6 that he pointed out. Did somebody notice that "offset > 8" was off-by-one, and should have been "offset >= 8"? And then changed it to "offset > 6" which is off-by-one in the other direction instead?

> I suggest to try the fix suggested in comment#7 and report back if that
> fixes the observed issue.

Vineet?

I still think gcc is doing the wrong thing, exactly because of that "pointlessly using the wrong range check" issue. This particular code comes from some old version of zlib, and I can't test because I don't have the ARC background to make any sense of the generated code.
Comment 11 Linus Torvalds 2021-05-03 16:18:05 UTC
(In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #10)
> 
>       This particular code comes
> from some old version of zlib, and I can't test because I don't have the ARC
> background to make any sense of the generated code.

Heh. We upgraded to a "recent version" of zlib back in 2006: 

   "Upgrade the zlib_inflate implementation in the kernel from a patched
    version 1.1.3/4 to a patched 1.2.3"

but it turns out that the "do things a 16-bit word at a time" was a kernel-local optimization for some very slow old PowerPC microcontroller.

The code in upstream zlib actually looks rather better (which is not saying much, admittedly), doesn't have any 16-bit accesses, and we probably should just try to synchronize with that instead.
Comment 12 Vineet Gupta 2021-05-03 17:25:55 UTC
Created attachment 50742 [details]
kernel patch as proposed on comment #7
Comment 13 Vineet Gupta 2021-05-03 17:28:14 UTC
Sorry the workaround proposed by Alexander doesn't seem to cure it (patch attached), outcome is the same

	mov	lp_count,r13	;5	#, bnd.65
	lp	@.L201	; lp_count:@.L50->@.L201	#,
	.align 2
.L50:
# ../lib/zlib_inflate/inffast.c:288: PUP(sout) = PUP(sfrom);
  ldd.a r18,[r21,8] # MEM[base: _496, offset: 0B], MEM[base: _496, offset: 0B]

# ../lib/zlib_inflate/inffast.c:288:  PUP(sout) = PUP(sfrom);
  std.ab r18,[r22,8] # MEM[base: vectp_prephitmp.73_741, offset: 0B], MEM[base: _496, offset: 0B]

	.align 2
.L201:
	; ZOL_END, begins @.L50	#
Comment 14 Linus Torvalds 2021-05-03 17:47:06 UTC
(In reply to Vineet Gupta from comment #13)
> Sorry the workaround proposed by Alexander doesn't seem to cure it (patch
> attached), outcome is the same

Vineet - it's not the ldd/std that is necessarily buggy, it's the earlier tests of the address that guard that vectorized path. 

So your quoted parts of the code generation aren't necessarily the problematic ones.

Did you actually test the code and check whether it has the same issue? Maybe it changed the address limit guards before that ldd/std?

I also sent you a separate patch to test if just upgrading to a newer version of the zlib code helps. Although that may be buggy for other reasons, it's not like I actually tested the end result.. But it would be interesting to hear if that one works for you (again, ldd/std might be a valid end result of trying to vectorize that code assuming the aliasing tests are done correctly in the vectorized loop headers).
Comment 15 Vineet Gupta 2021-05-03 18:45:34 UTC
(In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #14)
> (In reply to Vineet Gupta from comment #13)
> > Sorry the workaround proposed by Alexander doesn't seem to cure it (patch
> > attached), outcome is the same
> 
> Vineet - it's not the ldd/std that is necessarily buggy, it's the earlier
> tests of the address that guard that vectorized path. 
> 
> So your quoted parts of the code generation aren't necessarily the
> problematic ones.

/me slaps myself. How can I be so stupid.

> Did you actually test the code and check whether it has the same issue?
> Maybe it changed the address limit guards before that ldd/std?

The problem is is indeed gone. I need to analyze the assembly fully how it prevents the bad case. e.g. I'm still not comfortable seeing the loop entered with following and it doing 8 byte ldd/std when we know it should only do 2 at a time.

r21 = 0xbf178036  (pre-increment so 0x3e will be first src)
r22 = 0xbf1780b2
LPC = 4

80d9a360:	lp	12	;80d9a36c <inflate_fast+0x2c0>
80d9a364:	ldd.a	r18r19,[r21,8]
80d9a368:	std.ab	r18r19,[r22,8]

> I also sent you a separate patch to test if just upgrading to a newer
> version of the zlib code helps. Although that may be buggy for other
> reasons, it's not like I actually tested the end result.. But it would be
> interesting to hear if that one works for you (again, ldd/std might be a
> valid end result of trying to vectorize that code assuming the aliasing
> tests are done correctly in the vectorized loop headers).

Thx for that. And this seems to boot as well.
Comment 16 Andrew Pinski 2021-05-03 19:43:58 UTC
(In reply to Vineet Gupta from comment #15)
> The problem is is indeed gone. I need to analyze the assembly fully how it
> prevents the bad case. e.g. I'm still not comfortable seeing the loop
> entered with following and it doing 8 byte ldd/std when we know it should
> only do 2 at a time.

Why?  It is called a "vectorization" optimization. Where we are vectorizing the 2 byte load/stores into a 4x2 vector load/stores.
Comment 17 Richard Biener 2021-05-04 06:24:07 UTC
Not a bug.
Comment 18 Vineet Gupta 2021-05-04 19:33:17 UTC
(In reply to Richard Biener from comment #9)
> (In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #8)
> > (In reply to Alexander Monakov from comment #7)
> > > 
> > > Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while
> > > the vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for
> > > a 'short'.
> > 
> > They absolutely are.
> > 
> > And we build the kernel with -Wno-strict-aliasing exactly to make sure the
> > compiler doesn't think that "oh, I can make aliasing decisions based on type
> > information".
> > 
> > Because we have those kinds of issues all over, and we know which
> > architectures support unaligned loads etc, and all the tricks with
> > "memcpy()" and unions make for entirely unreadable code.
> > 
> > So please fix the aliasing logic to not be type-based when people explicitly
> > tell you not to do that.
> > 
> > Linus
> 
> Note alignment has nothing to do with strict-aliasing (-fno-strict-aliasing
> you mean btw).
> 
> One thing we do is (I'm not 50% sure this explains the observed issue) assume
> that if you have two accesses with type 'short' and they are aligned
> according to this type then they will not partly overlap.  Note this has
> nothing to do with C strict aliasing rules but is basic pointer math when
> you know lower zero bits.

OK, given that source code has type short, they will assume these things are short aligned and thus won't overlap for short accesses. But then the code actually generated by loop vectorizer assumes they are 8 bytes apart - since that is what it is generating.


> 
> I suggest to try the fix suggested in comment#7 and report back if that
> fixes the observed issue.
Comment 19 rguenther@suse.de 2021-05-05 06:32:32 UTC
On Tue, 4 May 2021, vgupta at synopsys dot com wrote:

> https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=100363
> 
> --- Comment #18 from Vineet Gupta <vgupta at synopsys dot com> ---
> (In reply to Richard Biener from comment #9)
> > (In reply to Linus Torvalds from comment #8)
> > > (In reply to Alexander Monakov from comment #7)
> > > > 
> > > > Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while
> > > > the vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for
> > > > a 'short'.
> > > 
> > > They absolutely are.
> > > 
> > > And we build the kernel with -Wno-strict-aliasing exactly to make sure the
> > > compiler doesn't think that "oh, I can make aliasing decisions based on type
> > > information".
> > > 
> > > Because we have those kinds of issues all over, and we know which
> > > architectures support unaligned loads etc, and all the tricks with
> > > "memcpy()" and unions make for entirely unreadable code.
> > > 
> > > So please fix the aliasing logic to not be type-based when people explicitly
> > > tell you not to do that.
> > > 
> > > Linus
> > 
> > Note alignment has nothing to do with strict-aliasing (-fno-strict-aliasing
> > you mean btw).
> > 
> > One thing we do is (I'm not 50% sure this explains the observed issue) assume
> > that if you have two accesses with type 'short' and they are aligned
> > according to this type then they will not partly overlap.  Note this has
> > nothing to do with C strict aliasing rules but is basic pointer math when
> > you know lower zero bits.
> 
> OK, given that source code has type short, they will assume these things are
> short aligned and thus won't overlap for short accesses. But then the code
> actually generated by loop vectorizer assumes they are 8 bytes apart - since
> that is what it is generating.

That's guarded by a runtime check but this check again assumes the
accesses are aligned as short and thus will fail if not
Comment 20 Nick Desaulniers 2021-05-05 19:59:30 UTC
(In reply to Alexander Monakov from comment #7)
>  Most likely the issue is that sout/sfrom are misaligned at runtime, while the > vectorized code somewhere relies on them being sufficiently aligned for a 'short'.
> It is unsafe to dereference a misaligned pointer. The pointed-to-type must
> have reduced alignment:

C 6.3.2.3p7 (N1548) says:

A pointer to an object type may be converted to a pointer to a
different object type. If the resulting pointer is not correctly
aligned) for the referenced type, the behavior is undefined.


===

We're working on adding diagnostics and UBSAN checks for these.  Perhaps with those in place, we'd be able to spot such a case in the kernel's initramfs decompression code.