buggy optimization levels...

[Erik Trulsson]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 10:30:57PM -0400, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 09:34:17PM -0400, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> >>OK.  Can the existence of such problems be confirmed reliably, say by 
> >>regression testing?
> >
> >The problem is in identifying precisely which piece of code is
> >failing.  A regression test is only useful if it concisely exercises a
> >specific set of tests.  As I said, in theory any optimization problems
> >can be tracked down to the failure of a certain piece of code, but in
> >something as large as the kernel it is not usually easy.
> 
> Ah, my apologies-- I believe I see where the confusion lies.
> 
> I understand that figuring out why the kernel died can be hard, 
> particularly if the failures aren't concise and completely reproducable, 
> and thus tracing the problem back to making the right change to gcc to fix 
> the optimization that caused the observed failure is thus also hard.

Note that it is not necessarily gcc which is at fault for such
failures. It may be a bug in gcc, but it may also be a bug in the code
being compiled that has a bug that only shows up under higher
optimization levels.
The latter is probably somewhat more common actually.


> 
> Fine.  However, you don't _need_ to identify the reason why the kernel 
> died, or solve the bug in global common expression elimination to solve the 
> problem of compiling the system with "cc -O2" resulting in a buggy kernel.  
> If you determine that compiling with "cc -O -fgcse" results in failures, 
> one does:
> 
> --- toplev.c_old        Thu Jul 31 22:23:22 2003
> +++ toplev.c    Thu Jul 31 22:24:01 2003
> @@ -4916,7 +4916,6 @@
>      {
>        flag_cse_follow_jumps = 1;
>        flag_cse_skip_blocks = 1;
> -      flag_gcse = 1;
>        flag_expensive_optimizations = 1;
>        flag_strength_reduce = 1;
>        flag_rerun_cse_after_loop = 1;
> 
> ...and makes it so that -O2, -O3, etc does not enable GCSE optimization.

But if the bug is not in gcc but in the code being compiled (and which
only happens to show up when compiled with GCSE optimization) such a
patch would disable this optimization for correct code also even though
it is not necessary there.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se