<li><a href="#chaining"><tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> chaining behavior</a></li>
<li><a href="#updating">Updating analysis results for transformations</a></li>
<li><a href="#implefficiency">Efficiency Issues</a></li>
- <li><a href="#passmanager">Pass Manager Issues</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#limitations">Limitations</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<div class="doc_text">
<p>The <tt>alias</tt> method is the primary interface used to determine whether
or not two memory objects alias each other. It takes two memory objects as
-input and returns MustAlias, MayAlias, or NoAlias as appropriate.</p>
+input and returns MustAlias, PartialAlias, MayAlias, or NoAlias as
+appropriate.</p>
<p>Like all <tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> interfaces, the <tt>alias</tt> method requires
that either the two pointer values be defined within the same function, or at
dependencies are ignored.</p>
<p>The MayAlias response is used whenever the two pointers might refer to the
-same object. If the two memory objects overlap, but do not start at the same
-location, return MayAlias.</p>
+same object.</p>
+
+<p>The PartialAlias response is used when the two memory objects are known
+to be overlapping in some way, but do not start at the same address.</p>
<p>The MustAlias response may only be returned if the two memory objects are
guaranteed to always start at exactly the same location. A MustAlias response
<!-- ======================================================================= -->
<div class="doc_subsection">
- <a name="passmanager">Pass Manager Issues</a>
+ <a name="limitations">Limitations</a>
</div>
<div class="doc_text">
-<p>PassManager support for alternative AliasAnalysis implementation
-has some issues.</p>
+<p>The AliasAnalysis infrastructure has several limitations which make
+writing a new <tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> implementation difficult.</p>
<p>There is no way to override the default alias analysis. It would
be very useful to be able to do something like "opt -my-aa -O2" and
passes between each pass, which prevents the use of <tt>FunctionPass</tt>
alias analysis passes.</p>
+<p>The <tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> API does have functions for notifying
+implementations when values are deleted or copied, however these
+aren't sufficient. There are many other ways that LLVM IR can be
+modified which could be relevant to <tt>AliasAnalysis</tt>
+implementations which can not be expressed.</p>
+
+<p>The <tt>AliasAnalysisDebugger</tt> utility seems to suggest that
+<tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> implementations can expect that they will be
+informed of any relevant <tt>Value</tt> before it appears in an
+alias query. However, popular clients such as <tt>GVN</tt> don't
+support this, and are known to trigger errors when run with the
+<tt>AliasAnalysisDebugger</tt>.</p>
+
+<p>Due to several of the above limitations, the most obvious use for
+the <tt>AliasAnalysisCounter</tt> utility, collecting stats on all
+alias queries in a compilation, doesn't work, even if the
+<tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> implementations don't use <tt>FunctionPass</tt>.
+There's no way to set a default, much less a default sequence,
+and there's no way to preserve it.</p>
+
+<p>The <tt>AliasSetTracker</tt> class (which is used by <tt>LICM</tt>
+makes a non-deterministic number of alias queries. This can cause stats
+collected by <tt>AliasAnalysisCounter</tt> to have fluctuations among
+identical runs, for example. Another consequence is that debugging
+techniques involving pausing execution after a predetermined number
+of queries can be unreliable.</p>
+
+<p>Many alias queries can be reformulated in terms of other alias
+queries. When multiple <tt>AliasAnalysis</tt> queries are chained together,
+it would make sense to start those queries from the beginning of the chain,
+with care taken to avoid infinite looping, however currently an
+implementation which wants to do this can only start such queries
+from itself.</p>
+
</div>
<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
<div class="doc_text">
-<p>The <tt>-basicaa</tt> pass is the default LLVM alias analysis. It is an
-aggressive local analysis that "knows" many important facts:</p>
+<p>The <tt>-basicaa</tt> pass is an aggressive local analysis that "knows"
+many important facts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Distinct globals, stack allocations, and heap allocations can never