Jakub Jelinek wrote:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 11:21:56AM -0800, Jeff Prothero wrote:
Starting with gcc 4.9, -O2 implicitly invokes
-fisolate-erroneous-paths-dereference:
which
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html
documents as
Detect paths that trigger erroneous or undefined behavior due to
dereferencing a null pointer. Isolate those paths from the main control
flow and turn the statement with erroneous or undefined behavior into a
trap. This flag is enabled by default at -O2 and higher.
This results in a sizable number of previously working embedded programs mysteriously
crashing when recompiled under gcc 4.9. The problem is that embedded
programs will often have ram starting at address zero (think hardware-defined
interrupt vectors, say) which gets initialized by code which the
-fisolate-erroneous-paths-deference logic can recognize as reading and/or
writing address zero.
If you have some pages mapped at address 0, you really should compile your
code with -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks, otherwise you can run into tons
of other issues.
Hmmmm, Passing the additional option in user code would be one thing,
but what about library code? E.g., using memcpy (either explicitly or
implicitly for a structure copy)?
It looks to me like cr16 and avr are currently the only architectures
that disable flag_delete_null_pointer_checks entirely, but I am sure
that this issue affects other embedded targets besides nios2, too. E.g.
scanning Mentor's ARM board support library, I see a whole pile of
devices that have memory mapped at address zero (TI Stellaris/Tiva,
Energy Micro EFM32Gxxx, Atmel AT91SAMxxx, ....). Plus our simulator
BSPs assume a flat address space starting at address 0.