[PATCH] x86: Don't remove empty x86 properties

H.J. Lu hjl.tools@gmail.com
Fri Dec 7 14:46:00 GMT 2018


On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 10:22 PM Jim Dehnert <dehnert@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Something's been bothering me about much of this discussion, which is probably related to Cary's question about intended usage.  We had some features analogous to these, for example concerning floating point behavior, in the SGI compilers and tools 20+ years ago.  One of the things we realized in the process was that there are at least two different classes of usage with different desired properties.
>
> The first class involves what this discussion is focused on -- the ability to catch invalid mixtures of assumptions, e.g., code that assumes or requires something (like your X86 features) vs. other code or hardware that doesn't satisfy those requirements.  When one catches such a mismatch (in the linker or loader, say), one could reject the program, or it might be preferable to let it pass and just use the information for better error messages if a failure occurs at runtime.  The latter decision might make sense if an actual failure is unlikely, but the decision might vary for different features, or different tools, or different vendors.
>
> For such usage, it is not necessarily critical that the property information be available for every component object.  For example, it may be known that old objects created before the property became available didn't ever require it.  It may also be desirable to just accept objects from toolchains that don't (yet) support the property bits, and accept that they might fail more dramatically.
>
> The second class involves things like cross-object optimization decisions, where some global attribute must apply to make the optimization valid.  In this case, missing information might produce an incorrect optimization.  An example might be a linker decision to include software FP support for a simple processor depending on whether any object uses FP.
>
> The point of bringing up this distinction is that the same property information might be used by different tools or toolchains, or in different contexts, in different ways in terms of whether a property is required or not, and in terms of whether accurate information is required from all component objects.  It's not a good idea to make assumptions when defining the property bit treatment about which case applies -- you should just carefully define what the bit means, how it's combined when linking objects (AND vs. OR), and, importantly, how a downstream consumer knows whether or not the information is complete.  In particular, a decision to discard data if it's missing from some objects, or if the operation applied yields a particular result, can make it impossible for a downstream consumer to tell the difference between missing information and combinations yielding 0, and it removes the ability of a consumer to do something intelligent for the first case.
>
> The above are general observations.  There's a more subtle issue in this particular proposal that's related (as I understand it).  Because you're packing property bits into larger units, and will presumably be adding additional properties in the future, you'll want to be able to tell which bits are valid in a particular object (e.g., was it created before or after the new property was added?).  Otherwise, bits might be zero either because the property isn't true, or because it wasn't supported by the tool that created the object.  You can't really deal with this using version information, because there's no good way to combine versions without discarding information.  I'd suggest including a "complete" bit for each property bit, meaning that all components of the object provided valid values for the property.  Non-complete property bits could still contain useful data, but a consumer could not assume it was a valid combination of all the component objects.  (This implies that the complete bits are all AND bits - the output value should be an AND of all the input values when combining objects.)   Note that the separate complete bits removes the need for the OR_AND construct, which was trying to combine two separate concepts in a single bit.

Thanks Jim.  Your description pretty much captures my intention.
OR_AND provides a way to
mark an object with complete info.  If the bit is 1, the feature
exists.  If the bit is 0, the feature does
not exist.  A "complete" bit is an interesting idea.   How should it
be mapped to NEEDED and USED
properties? I have

[hjl@gnu-cfl-2 ld-plugin]$ readelf -n /bin/ld | head

Displaying notes found in: .note.gnu.property
  Owner                 Data size Description
  GNU                  0x00000020 NT_GNU_PROPERTY_TYPE_0
      Properties: x86 ISA used: CMOV, SSE, SSE2
x86 feature used: x86, XMM

So /bin/ld only uses x86 and XMM with CMOV, SSE, SSE2 and nothing else.
This info is generated by

as:

  -mx86-used-note=[no|yes] (default: yes)
                          generate x86 used ISA and feature properties

and linker automatically.   How can I achieve the same with a "complete" bit?


-- 
H.J.



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