To make sure that no barrier gets placed on the architectural execution
path, each
BLR x<N>
instruction gets transformed to a
BL __llvm_slsblr_thunk_x<N>
instruction, with __llvm_slsblr_thunk_x<N> a thunk that contains
__llvm_slsblr_thunk_x<N>:
BR x<N>
<speculation barrier>
Therefore, the BLR instruction gets split into 2; one BL and one BR.
This transformation results in not inserting a speculation barrier on
the architectural execution path.
The mitigation is off by default and can be enabled by the
harden-sls-blr subtarget feature.
As a linker is allowed to clobber X16 and X17 on function calls, the
above code transformation would not be correct in case a linker does so
when N=16 or N=17. Therefore, when the mitigation is enabled, generation
of BLR x16 or BLR x17 is avoided.
As BLRA* indirect calls are not produced by LLVM currently, this does
not aim to implement support for those.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D81402
Kristof Beyls