This patch introduces the LLVM components of a type sanitizer: a
sanitizer for type-based aliasing violations.
It is based on Hal Finkel's https://reviews.llvm.org/D32198.
C/C++ have type-based aliasing rules, and LLVM's optimizer can exploit
these given TBAA metadata added by Clang. Roughly, a pointer of given
type cannot be used to access an object of a different type (with, of
course, certain exceptions). Unfortunately, there's a lot of code in the
wild that violates these rules (e.g. for type punning), and such code
often must be built with -fno-strict-aliasing. Performance is often
sacrificed as a result. Part of the problem is the difficulty of finding
TBAA violations. Hopefully, this sanitizer will help.
For each TBAA type-access descriptor, encoded in LLVM's IR using
metadata, the corresponding instrumentation pass generates descriptor
tables. Thus, for each type (and access descriptor), we have a unique
pointer representation. Excepting anonymous-namespace types, these
tables are comdat, so the pointer values should be unique across the
program. The descriptors refer to other descriptors to form a type
aliasing tree (just like LLVM's TBAA metadata does). The instrumentation
handles the "fast path" (where the types match exactly and no
partial-overlaps are detected), and defers to the runtime to handle all
of the more-complicated cases. The runtime, of course, is also
responsible for reporting errors when those are detected.
The runtime uses essentially the same shadow memory region as tsan, and
we use 8 bytes of shadow memory, the size of the pointer to the type
descriptor, for every byte of accessed data in the program. The value 0
is used to represent an unknown type. The value -1 is used to represent
an interior byte (a byte that is part of a type, but not the first
byte). The instrumentation first checks for an exact match between the
type of the current access and the type for that address recorded in the
shadow memory. If it matches, it then checks the shadow for the
remainder of the bytes in the type to make sure that they're all -1. If
not, we call the runtime. If the exact match fails, we next check if the
value is 0 (i.e. unknown). If it is, then we check the shadow for the
remainder of the byes in the type (to make sure they're all 0). If
they're not, we call the runtime. We then set the shadow for the access
address and set the shadow for the remaining bytes in the type to -1
(i.e. marking them as interior bytes). If the type indicated by the
shadow memory for the access address is neither an exact match nor 0, we
call the runtime.
The instrumentation pass inserts calls to the memset intrinsic to set
the memory updated by memset, memcpy, and memmove, as well as
allocas/byval (and for lifetime.start/end) to reset the shadow memory to
reflect that the type is now unknown. The runtime intercepts memset,
memcpy, etc. to perform the same function for the library calls.
The runtime essentially repeats these checks, but uses the full TBAA
algorithm, just as the compiler does, to determine when two types are
permitted to alias. In a situation where access overlap has occurred and
aliasing is not permitted, an error is generated.
Clang's TBAA representation currently has a problem representing unions,
as demonstrated by the one XFAIL'd test in the runtime patch. We'll
update the TBAA representation to fix this, and at the same time, update
the sanitizer.
When the sanitizer is active, we disable actually using the TBAA
metadata for AA. This way we're less likely to use TBAA to remove memory
accesses that we'd like to verify.
As a note, this implementation does not use the compressed shadow-memory
scheme discussed previously
(http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-April/111766.html). That
scheme would not handle the struct-path (i.e. structure offset)
information that our TBAA represents. I expect we'll want to further
work on compressing the shadow-memory representation, but I think it
makes sense to do that as follow-up work.
It goes together with the corresponding clang changes
(https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/76260) and compiler-rt
changes (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/76261)
PR: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/76259