llvm-6502/docs/BitSets.rst
Peter Collingbourne 5a81e14385 Introduce bitset metadata format and bitset lowering pass.
This patch introduces a new mechanism that allows IR modules to co-operatively
build pointer sets corresponding to addresses within a given set of
globals. One particular use case for this is to allow a C++ program to
efficiently verify (at each call site) that a vtable pointer is in the set
of valid vtable pointers for the class or its derived classes. One way of
doing this is for a toolchain component to build, for each class, a bit set
that maps to the memory region allocated for the vtables, such that each 1
bit in the bit set maps to a valid vtable for that class, and lay out the
vtables next to each other, to minimize the total size of the bit sets.

The patch introduces a metadata format for representing pointer sets, an
'@llvm.bitset.test' intrinsic and an LTO lowering pass that lays out the globals
and builds the bitsets, and documents the new feature.

Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D7288

git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@230054 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
2015-02-20 20:30:47 +00:00

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=======
Bitsets
=======
This is a mechanism that allows IR modules to co-operatively build pointer
sets corresponding to addresses within a given set of globals. One example
of a use case for this is to allow a C++ program to efficiently verify (at
each call site) that a vtable pointer is in the set of valid vtable pointers
for the type of the class or its derived classes.
To use the mechanism, a client creates a global metadata node named
``llvm.bitsets``. Each element is a metadata node with three elements:
the first is a metadata string containing an identifier for the bitset,
the second is a global variable and the third is a byte offset into the
global variable.
This will cause a link-time optimization pass to generate bitsets from the
memory addresses referenced from the elements of the bitset metadata. The pass
will lay out the referenced globals consecutively, so their definitions must
be available at LTO time. An intrinsic, :ref:`llvm.bitset.test <bitset.test>`,
generates code to test whether a given pointer is a member of a bitset.
:Example:
::
target datalayout = "e-p:32:32"
@a = internal global i32 0
@b = internal global i32 0
@c = internal global i32 0
@d = internal global [2 x i32] [i32 0, i32 0]
!llvm.bitsets = !{!0, !1, !2, !3, !4}
!0 = !{!"bitset1", i32* @a, i32 0}
!1 = !{!"bitset1", i32* @b, i32 0}
!2 = !{!"bitset2", i32* @b, i32 0}
!3 = !{!"bitset2", i32* @c, i32 0}
!4 = !{!"bitset2", i32* @d, i32 4}
declare i1 @llvm.bitset.test(i8* %ptr, metadata %bitset) nounwind readnone
define i1 @foo(i32* %p) {
%pi8 = bitcast i32* %p to i8*
%x = call i1 @llvm.bitset.test(i8* %pi8, metadata !"bitset1")
ret i1 %x
}
define i1 @bar(i32* %p) {
%pi8 = bitcast i32* %p to i8*
%x = call i1 @llvm.bitset.test(i8* %pi8, metadata !"bitset2")
ret i1 %x
}
define void @main() {
%a1 = call i1 @foo(i32* @a) ; returns 1
%b1 = call i1 @foo(i32* @b) ; returns 1
%c1 = call i1 @foo(i32* @c) ; returns 0
%a2 = call i1 @bar(i32* @a) ; returns 0
%b2 = call i1 @bar(i32* @b) ; returns 1
%c2 = call i1 @bar(i32* @c) ; returns 1
%d02 = call i1 @bar(i32* getelementptr ([2 x i32]* @d, i32 0, i32 0)) ; returns 0
%d12 = call i1 @bar(i32* getelementptr ([2 x i32]* @d, i32 0, i32 1)) ; returns 1
ret void
}