RFC: (Unconditionally) enable -fno-strict-overflow for kernel builds

From: Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 15:56:16 +0200
I propose to unconditionally add the switch  -fno-strict-overflow to the
kernel compilation.  See the patch at the end of message for exact change
proposed.

What does it do. It disallows useless and counter-intuitive behaviour of
the compiler(s) for the signed overflow. Basically, the issue is that
the C standard left signed overflow as undefined to allow for different
hardware implementation of signess to be used for signed arithmetic.
De-facto, all architectures where FreeBSD works or have a chance to be
ported, use two-complement signed integer representation, and developers
intuition is right about it.

The compiler authors take the undefined part there as a blanket to perform
optimizations which are assuming that signed overflow cannot happen.  The
problem with that approach is that typical checks for bounds are exactly
the place where the overflow can happen.  Instead of making some artificial
example, I would just point to my own r258088 and r258397.

What makes the things much worse is that the behaviour is highly depended
on the optimization level of the exact version of compiler.

What other projects did in this regard. They turned the same knob
unconditionally. I can point at least to Linux kernel and Postgresql.
Python uses -fwrapv, which is equivalent to the -fno-strict-overflow
on the two-complement machines.  Linux used -fwrapv before switched
to -fno-strict-overflow.

diff --git a/sys/conf/kern.mk b/sys/conf/kern.mk
index 2939a59..6e6ba92 100644
--- a/sys/conf/kern.mk
+++ b/sys/conf/kern.mk
_at__at_ -148,6 +148,12 _at__at_ INLINE_LIMIT?=	8000
 CFLAGS+=	-ffreestanding
 
 #
+# Do not allow a compiler to optimize out overflow checks for signed
+# types.
+#
+CFLAGS+=	-fno-strict-overflow
+
+#
 # GCC SSP support
 #
 .if ${MK_SSP} != "no" && ${MACHINE_CPUARCH} != "ia64" && \

Received on Sat Nov 30 2013 - 12:56:52 UTC

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