Re: %fs and %gs segments on x86/x86-64

[Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes dot org>]

Hi Richard,

On 3 July 2015 at 10:29, Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's nice to have the ability to test address-space issues on a
> commonly available target at least (not sure if adding runtime
> testcases is easy though).

It should be easy to add testcases that run only on CPUs with the
"fsgsbase" feature, using __builtin_ia32_wrgsbase64().  Either that,
or we have to rely on the Linux-specific system call
arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_GS).  Which option is preferred?  Of course
we can also try both depending on what is available.

Once %gs can be set, the test case can be as simple as setting it to
the address of some 4096-bytes array and checking that various ways to
access small %gs-based addresses really access the array instead of
segfaulting.

>> * One case in which this patched gcc miscompiles code is found in the
>> attached bug1.c/bug1.s.
>
> Hmm, without being able to dive into it with a debugger it's hard to tell ;)
> You might want to open a bugreport in bugzilla for this at least.

Ok, I will.  For reference, I'm not sure why you are not able to dive
into it with a debugger: the gcc patch and the test were included as
attachements...

>> * The extra byte needed for the "%gs:" prefix is not explicitly
>> accounted for.  Is it only by chance that I did not observe gcc
>> underestimating how large the code it writes is, and then e.g. use
>> jump instructions that would be rejected by the assembler?
>
> Yes, I think you are just lucky here.

Note that I suspect that gcc does overestimates that end up
compensating, otherwise pure luck would likely run out before the end
of the hundreds of MBs of C code.  But I agree it is still a bug.  I
will look into that more.


A bientÃt,

Armin.