I've got an application written in pure C, mixed with some functions that contain pure ASM. Naked attribute isn't available for x86 (why? why?!) and my asm functions don't like when prologue and epilogue is messing with the stack. Is it somehow possible to create a pure assembler function that can be referenced from C code parts? I simply need the address of such ASM function.
Just use asm() outside a function block. The argument of asm() is simply ignored by the compiler and passed directly on to the assembler. For complex functions a separate assembly source file is the better option to avoid the awkward syntax.
Example:
#include <stdio.h>
asm("_one: \n\
movl $1,%eax \n\
ret \n\
");
int one();
int main() {
printf("result: %d\n", one());
return 0;
}
PS: Make sure you understand the calling conventions of your platform. Many times you can not just copy/past assembly code.
PPS: If you care about performance, use extended asm instead. Extended asm essentially inlines the assembly code into your C/C++ code and is much faster, especially for short assembly functions. For larger assembly functions a seperate assembly source file is preferable, so this answer is really a hack for the rare case that you need a function pointer to a small assembly function.
Good news everyone. GCC developers finally implemented attribute((naked)) for x86. The feature will be available in GCC 8.
Certainly, just create a .s file (assembly source), which is run through gas (the assembler) to create a normal object file.
Related
Is it possible to write inline assembly (Intel syntax) with GCC or Clang, without needing to understand the clobber list "stuff"?
I'm going to guess "no" because the clobber list "stuff" ensures you don't over-write the register the compiler wrote to (immediately before your inline assembly begins)?
GNU C Basic inline asm statements (no operand/clobber lists) are not recommended for basically anything except maybe the body of an __attribute__((naked)) function. Why can't local variable be used in GNU C basic inline asm statements? (globals can't safely be used either.)
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DontUseInlineAsm says to see ConvertBasicAsmToExtended for reasons not to use Basic asm statements. You can't really do anything safely in Basic asm; even asm("cli"); can get reordered with any memory accesses that aren't volatile.
If you're going to use inline asm at all (instead of writing a stand-alone function in asm, or C with intrinsics), you need to describe your string of asm instruction in exact detail to the compiler, in terms of a black box with input and/or output operands, and/or clobbers. See https://stackoverflow.com/tags/inline-assembly/info for links to guides, including some SO answers about using input / output constraints.
Think hard before deciding it's really worth using GNU C inline asm for anything. If you can get the compiler to emit the same instructions another way, that's almost always better. Intrinsics or pure C allow constant-propagation optimization; inline asm doesn't (unless you do stuff like if(_builtin_constant_p(x)) { pure C version } else { inline asm version }).
Intel syntax: in GCC, compile with -masm=intel so your asm template will be part of an Intel-syntax .s, and the compiler will substitute in operands in Intel syntax. (Like dword ptr [rsp] instead of (%rsp) for "m"(my_int)).
In clang I'm not sure there's any convenient way to use Intel-syntax in normal asm statements.
There is one other option though, if you don't care about efficient code (but then why are you using asm?): clang supports -fasm-blocks to allow syntax like MSVC's inefficient style of inline asm. And yes, this uses Intel syntax.
Is there any way to complie a microsoft style inline-assembly code on a linux platform? shows how inefficient the resulting code is: full of compiler-generated instructions to store input variables to memory for the asm{} block to read them. Because MSVC-style asm blocks can't do inputs or outputs in registers. (Clang doesn't support the leave-a-value-in-EAX method for getting a single value out so the output has to be stored/reloaded as well.)
You don't get to specify clobbers for this, so I assume an asm block implies a "memory" clobber, along with clobbers on all registers you write. (Or maybe even just mention.)
I would not recommend this; it's basically not possible to wrap a single instruction or handful of instructions efficiently this way. Only if you're writing a whole loop can you amortize the overhead of getting inputs into an asm{} block.
I am using LLVM to build a simple language along the lines demonstrated in the LLVM kaleidoscope documentation. However the doc omits two important things (at least):
how to call C++ code
how to do strings
You can imagine a custom language allows constructs like,
String str("Hello World");
String str1(" and StackOverflow");
str.append(str1);
Since LLVM ships with SmallString, the obvious thing to do is treat the user type String as a llvm::SmallString and emit code for it. But how to do this? I see very little sense in creating a String class from scratch provided there's a way to invoke those C++ calls from LLVM. Would one use IRBuilder to build out the C++ calls?
Another option is to create C++ file containing the equivalent C++ code for the user provided code in terms of llvm::SmallString intermixed with inlined IR code ala the kaleidoscope demo ... and pass the whole thing to Clang/LLVM to compile down to object code. But Clang/LLVM doesn't allow intermixing this way.
Putting aside technicalities of creating static strings that go into the initializer how do people do this? Once this is sorted out for strings, most likely the approach would work for sets, hashmaps, vectors, and all the various other containers LLVM ships with.
LLVM is a strange, cool thing. The things I need are right there, and not readily accessible based on any documentation I can find.
I want a considered approach because even this simple hello world program generates 81 lines of IR code. Replace the llvm::SimpleString with a C-string and the resulting IR code is smaller almost by an order of 10:
#include <llvm/ADT/SmallString.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
llvm::SmallString<32> str("hello world\n");
printf("%s\n", str.c_str());
return 0;
}
That's a lot of code to hand assemble and we're no where close to supporting all the methods doable for strings.
Thanks.
Consider the following code:
int a;
int b;
Is there a way to force that a precedes b on the stack?
One way to do the ordering would be to put b in a function:
void foo() {
int b;
}
...
int a;
foo();
However, that would generally work only if b isn't inlined.
Maybe there's a different way to do that? Putting an inline assembler between the two declarations may do a trick, but I am not sure.
Your initial question was about forcing a function call to not be inlined.
To improve on Jordy Baylac's answer, you might try to declare the function within the block calling it, and perhaps use a statement expr:
#define FOO_WITHOUT_INLINING(c,i) ({ \
extern int foo (char, int) __attribute__((noinline)); \
int r = foo(c,i); \
r; })
(If the type of foo is unknown, you could use typeof)
However, I still think that your question is badly formulated (and is meaningless, if one avoid reading your comments which should really go inside the question, which should have mentioned your libmill). By definition of inlining, a compiler can inline any function as it wants without changing the semantics of the program.
For example, a user of your library might legitimately compile it with -flto -O2 (both at compiling and at linking stage). I don't know what would happen then.
I believe you might redesign your code, perhaps using -fsplit-stack; are you implementing some call/cc in C? Then look inside the numerous existing implementations of it, and inside Gabriel Kerneis CPC.... See also setcontext(3) & longjmp(3)
Perhaps you might need to use somewhere the return_twice (and/or nothrow) function attribute of GCC, or some _Pragma like GCC optimize
Then you edited your question to change it completely (asking about order of variables on the call stack), still without mentioning in the question your libmill and its go macro (as you should; comments are volatile so should not contain most of the question).
But the C compiler is not even supposed to have a call stack (an hypothetical C99 conforming compiler could do whole program optimization to avoid any call stack) in the compiled program. And GCC is certainly allowed to put some variables outside of the call stack (e.g. only in registers) and it is doing that. And some implementations (IA64 probably) have two call stacks.
So your changed question is completely meaniningless: a variable might not sit on the stack (e.g. only be in a register, or even disappear completely if the compiler can prove it is useless after some other optimizations), and the compiler is allowed to optimize and use the same call stack slot for two variables (and GCC is doing such an optimization quite often). So you cannot force any order on the call stack layout.
If you need to be sure that two local variables a & b have some well defined order on the call stack, make them into a struct e.g.
struct { int _a, _b; } _locals;
#define a _locals._a
#define b _locals._b
then, be sure to put the &_locals somewhere (e.g. in a volatile global or thread-local variable). Since some versions of GCC (IIRC 4.8 or 4.7) had some optimization passes to reorder the fields of non-escaping struct-s
BTW, you might customize GCC with your MELT extension to help about that (e.g. introduce your own builtin or pragma doing part of the work).
Apparently, you are inventing some new dialect of C (à la CPC); then you should say that!
below there is a way, using gcc attributes:
char foo (char, int) __attribute__ ((noinline));
and, as i said, you can try -fno-inline-functions option, but this is for all functions in the compilation process
It is still unclear for me why you want function not to be inline-d, but here is non-pro solution I am proposing:
You can make this function in separate object something.o file.
Since you will include header only, there will be no way for the compiler to inline the function.
However linker might decide to inline it later at linking time.
malloc returns a void pointer.so why is it not working for me without typecasting the return value?
The error pretty clear said that gcc is not allowing conversion from void* to int*.
In C, you don't have to cast. In fact it's a bad idea to cast there since it can cause certain subtle errors.
However, casting is required in C++ so that would be my first guess, that you're somehow invoking the C++ compiler. Perhaps your source files are *.cpp or *.C both of which may be auto-magigically treated as C++ rather than C.
See here for more detail:
C++ source files conventionally use one of the suffixes ‘.C’, ‘.cc’, ‘.cpp’, ‘.CPP’, ‘.c++’, ‘.cp’, or ‘.cxx’; C++ header files often use ‘.hh’, ‘.hpp’, ‘.H’, or (for shared template code) ‘.tcc’; and preprocessed C++ files use the suffix ‘.ii’. GCC recognizes files with these names and compiles them as C++ programs even if you call the compiler the same way as for compiling C programs (usually with the name gcc).
The fact that it knows you're trying to convert void* to int* means that you have a valid malloc prototype in place so I can't see it being anything other than the imposition of C++ rules.
Without code I can't help you properly, but you can try this:
p = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
Give more info about what you want to do and what you are allocating.
I'm currently using GCC 4.5.3, compiled for PowerPC 440, and am compiling some code that doesn't require libc. I don't have any direct calls to memcpy(), but the compiler seems to be inserting one during the build.
There are linker options like -nostdlib, -nostartfiles, -nodefaultlibs but I'm unable to use them as I'm not doing the linking phase. I'm only compiling. With something like this:
$ powerpc-440-eabi-gcc -O2 -g -c -o output.o input.c
If I check the output.o with nm, I see a reference to memcpy:
$ powerpc-440-eabi-nm output.o | grep memcpy
U memcpy
$
The GCC man page makes it clear how to remove calls to memcpy and other libc calls with the linker, but I don't want the compiler to insert them in the first place, as I'm using a completely different linker (not GNU's ld, and it doesn't know about libc).
Thanks for any help you can provide.
There is no need to -fno-builtins or -ffreestanding as they will unnecessarily disable many important optimizations
This is actually "optimized" by gcc's tree-loop-distribute-patterns, so to disable the unwanted behavior while keeping the useful builtin capabilities, you can just use:
-fno-tree-loop-distribute-patterns
Musl-libc uses this flag for its build and has the following note in their configure script (I looked through the source and didn't find any macros, so this should be enough)
# Check for options that may be needed to prevent the compiler from
# generating self-referential versions of memcpy,, memmove, memcmp,
# and memset. Really, we should add a check to determine if this
# option is sufficient, and if not, add a macro to cripple these
# functions with volatile...
# tryflag CFLAGS_MEMOPS -fno-tree-loop-distribute-patterns
You can also add this as an attribute to individual functions in gcc using its optimize attribute, so that other functions can benefit from calling mem*()
__attribute__((optimize("no-tree-loop-distribute-patterns")))
size_t strlen(const char *s){ //without attribute, gcc compiles to jmp strlen
size_t i = -1ull;
do { ++i; } while (s[i]);
return i;
}
Alternatively, (at least for now) you may add a confounding null asm statement into your loop to thwart the pattern recognition.
size_t strlen(const char *s){
size_t i = -1ull;
do {
++i;
asm("");
} while (s[i]) ;
return i;
}
Gcc emits call to memcpy in some circumstance, for example if you are copying a structure.
There is no way to change GCC behaviour but you can try to avoid this by modifying your code to avoid such copy. Best bet is to look at the assembly to figure out why gcc emitted the memcpy and try to work around it. This is going to be annoying though, since you basically need to understand how gcc works.
Extract from http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Standards.html:
Most of the compiler support routines used by GCC are present in libgcc, but there are a few exceptions. GCC requires the freestanding environment provide memcpy, memmove, memset and memcmp. Finally, if __builtin_trap is used, and the target does not implement the trap pattern, then GCC will emit a call to abort.
You need to disable a that optimization with -fno-builtin. I had this problem once when trying to compile memcpy for a C library. It called itself. Oops!
You can also make your binary a "freestanding" one:
The ISO C standard defines (in clause 4) two classes of conforming implementation. A conforming hosted implementation supports the whole standard [...]; a conforming freestanding implementation is only required to provide certain library facilities: those in , , , and ; since AMD1, also those in ; and in C99, also those in and . [...].
The standard also defines two environments for programs, a freestanding environment, required of all implementations and which may not have library facilities beyond those required of freestanding implementations, where the handling of program startup and termination are implementation-defined, and a hosted environment, which is not required, in which all the library facilities are provided and startup is through a function int main (void) or int main (int, char *[]).
An OS kernel would be a freestanding environment; a program using the facilities of an operating system would normally be in a hosted implementation.
(paragraph added by me)
More here. And the corresponding gcc option/s (keywords -ffreestanding or -fno-builtin) can be found here.
This is quite an old question, but I've hit the same issue, and none of the solutions here worked.
So I defined this function:
static __attribute__((always_inline)) inline void* imemcpy (void *dest, const void *src, size_t len) {
char *d = dest;
const char *s = src;
while (len--)
*d++ = *s++;
return dest;
}
And then used it instead of memcpy. This has solved the inlining issue for me permanently. Not very useful if you are compiling some sort of library though.