llvm/docs/FaultMaps.rst
Sanjoy Das 1991e2a4df [CodeGen] Introduce a FAULTING_LOAD_OP pseudo-op.
Summary:
This instruction encodes a loading operation that may fault, and a label
to branch to if the load page-faults.  The locations of potentially
faulting loads and their "handler" destinations are recorded in a
FaultMap section, meant to be consumed by LLVM's clients.

Nothing generates FAULTING_LOAD_OP instructions yet, but they will be
used in a future change.

The documentation (FaultMaps.rst) needs improvement and I will update
this diff with a more expanded version shortly.

Depends on D10196

Reviewers: rnk, reames, AndyAyers, ab, atrick, pgavlin

Reviewed By: atrick, pgavlin

Subscribers: llvm-commits

Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D10197

git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@239740 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
2015-06-15 18:44:08 +00:00

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==============================
FaultMaps and implicit checks
==============================
.. contents::
:local:
:depth: 2
Motivation
==========
Code generated by managed language runtimes tend to have checks that
are required for safety but never fail in practice. In such cases, it
is profitable to make the non-failing case cheaper even if it makes
the failing case significantly more expensive. This asymmetry can be
exploited by folding such safety checks into operations that can be
made to fault reliably if the check would have failed, and recovering
from such a fault by using a signal handler.
For example, Java requires null checks on objects before they are read
from or written to. If the object is ``null`` then a
``NullPointerException`` has to be thrown, interrupting normal
execution. In practice, however, dereferencing a ``null`` pointer is
extremely rare in well-behaved Java programs, and typically the null
check can be folded into a nearby memory operation that operates on
the same memory location.
The Fault Map Section
=====================
Information about implicit checks generated by LLVM are put in a
special "fault map" section. On Darwin this section is named
``__llvm_faultmaps``.
The format of this section is
.. code-block:: none
Header {
uint8 : Fault Map Version (current version is 1)
uint8 : Reserved (expected to be 0)
uint16 : Reserved (expected to be 0)
}
uint32 : NumFunctions
FunctionInfo[NumFunctions] {
uint64 : FunctionAddress
uint32 : NumFaultingPCs
uint32 : Reserved (expected to be 0)
FunctionFaultInfo[NumFaultingPCs] {
uint32 : FaultType = FaultMaps::FaultingLoad (only legal value currently)
uint32 : FaultingPCOffset
uint32 : handlerPCOffset
}
}