Re: [PATCH v5] x86: use builtins to read eflags

[Florian Weimer]

* Linus Torvalds:

> You can actually operate on EFLAGS at multiple granularities.
>
>  - normal pushf/popf. Don't do it unless you are doing system software.

There's one exception: PUSHF/twiddle/POPF/PUSHF/compare is the
recommended sequence to detect CPUID support on i386 (in userspace and
elsewhere).

>  - you can use lahf/sahc to load/store only the arithmetic flags
> into/from AH. Deprecated, and going away, but historically supported.

And these instructions were missing from the original long mode, but
they were added back.

> Yes, yes, that complete mental breakdown with pushf/popf did get
> fixed, but it really makes me very wary of thinking that we should
> ever use a built-in that compiler writers really fundamentally got so
> wrong before.
>
> What would make me think that you'd get it right now? In user space,
> you'll basically never actually see the whole system flags issues, so
> your test-cases would never work or be very contrieved. You'd have to
> really work at it to see the problems.

I think as the result of the nature of that kind of bug it does not
matter whether you use a compiler builtin to access the flags (to put
their combined value into a general-purpose register).

GCC doesn't have barriers in the built-ins (if we are talking about
__builtin_ia32_readeflags_u64 and __builtin_ia32_writeeflags_u64).  I
expect they are actually pretty useless, and were merely added for
completeness of the intrinsics headers.

It's not that you can write

  unsigned a, b, c;
  // …
  c = a + b;

and examine __builtin_ia32_readeflags_u64() to see if there was an
overflow.  Neither GCC nor Clang model the EFLAGS register and
arithmetic expression side effects to make this possible.

Thanks,
Florian