This flag was originally part of D70157, but was removed as we carved away pieces of the review. Since we have the nop support checked in, and it appears mature(*), I think it's time to add the master flag. For now, it will default to nop padding, but once the prefix padding support lands, we'll update the defaults.
(*) I can now confirm that downstream testing of the changes which have landed to date - nop padding and compiler support for suppressions - is passing all of the functional testing we've thrown at it. There might still be something lurking, but we've gotten enough coverage to be confident of the basic approach.
Note that the new flag can be used either when assembling an .s file, or when using the integrated assembler directly from the compiler. The later will use all of the suppression mechanism and should always generate correct code. We don't yet have assembly syntax for the suppressions, so passing this directly to the assembler w/a raw .s file may result in broken code. Use at your own risk.
Also note that this isn't the wiring for the clang option. I think the most recent review for that is D72227, but I've lost track, so that might be off.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D72738
WARNING: If you're looking at this patch because you're looking for a full
performace mitigation of the Intel JCC Erratum, this is not it!
This is a preliminary patch on the patch towards mitigating the performance
regressions caused by Intel's microcode update for Jump Conditional Code
Erratum. For context, see:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000055650.html
The patch adds the required assembler infrastructure and command line options
needed to exercise the logic for INTERNAL TESTING. These are NOT public flags,
and should not be used for anything other than LLVM's own testing/debugging
purposes. They are likely to change both in spelling and meaning.
WARNING: This patch is knowingly incorrect in some cornercases. We need, and
do not yet provide, a mechanism to selective enable/disable the padding.
Conversation on this will continue in parellel with work on extending this
infrastructure to support prefix padding.
The goal here is to have the assembler align specific instructions such that
they neither cross or end at a 32 byte boundary. The impacted instructions are:
a. Conditional jump.
b. Fused conditional jump.
c. Unconditional jump.
d. Indirect jump.
e. Ret.
f. Call.
The new options for llvm-mc are:
-x86-align-branch-boundary=NUM aligns branches within NUM byte boundary.
-x86-align-branch=TYPE[+TYPE...] specifies types of branches to align.
A new MCFragment type, MCBoundaryAlignFragment, is added, which may emit
NOP to align the fused/unfused branch.
alignBranchesBegin inserts MCBoundaryAlignFragment before instructions,
alignBranchesEnd marks the end of the branch to be aligned,
relaxBoundaryAlign grows or shrinks sizes of NOP to align the target branch.
Nop padding is disabled when the instruction may be rewritten by the linker,
such as TLS Call.
Process Note: I am landing a patch by skan as it has been LGTMed, and
continuing to iterate on the review is simply slowing us down at this point.
We can and will continue to iterate in tree.
Patch By: skan
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D70157
Philip Reames