[PATCH] [RFC] arm: fix memset-related crashes caused by recent GCC (4.7.2) optimizations

[Will Deacon]

Hi Dirk,

On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 01:50:06PM +0000, Dirk Behme wrote:
> On 12.02.2013 17:36, Will Deacon wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 03:58:01PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> >> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 02:00:08PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> >>> Interesting... the GCC documentation also states that ffreestanding implies
> >>> fno-builtin, so memset and co shouldn't be targetted for this sort of
> >>> optimisation by GCC. Have you observed this problem even when passing this
> >>> option?
> >>
> >> Rather than wondering whether we should be using -ffreestanding or not
> >> (which, x86 people have strongly resisted) I suggest that we just fix
> >> our memset() implementation to be compliant.
> >>
> >> The reason it's not compliant is that I saw no reason for it to be
> >> compliant back in the gcc 2.7.x days, and it's persisted like that for
> >> the last 19-ish years.  If GCC is now making use of the return value,
> >> then we need to fix that and undo the "optimization" in our string.h.
> >>
> >> So let's just bite the bullet, make the asm memset() compliant, and
> >> clean up string.h.
> >
> > That would be the ideal thing to do, because it allows the compiler to
> > optimise around these functions, however it does mean we need to check/fix
> > *all* of the string functions at least (if we don't pass -fno-builtin then
> > any builtin function is up for optimisation, including strcpy etc).
> 
> Do we already have an agreed solution for this issue anywhere, now?

I thought that the conclusion was to go with Ivan's suggestion since memset
is the only function which doesn't follow what the compiler expects.

Will