[IR] Introduce a dereferenceable_or_null(N) attribute.
authorSanjoy Das <sanjoy@playingwithpointers.com>
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 20:29:50 +0000 (20:29 +0000)
committerSanjoy Das <sanjoy@playingwithpointers.com>
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 20:29:50 +0000 (20:29 +0000)
Summary:
If a pointer is marked as dereferenceable_or_null(N), LLVM assumes it
is either `null` or `dereferenceable(N)` or both.  This change only
introduces the attribute and adds a token test case for the `llvm-as`
/ `llvm-dis`.  It does not hook up other parts of the optimizer to
actually exploit the attribute -- those changes will come later.

For pointers in address space 0, `dereferenceable(N)` is now exactly
equivalent to `dereferenceable_or_null(N)` && `nonnull`.  For other
address spaces, `dereferenceable(N)` is potentially weaker than
`dereferenceable_or_null(N)` && `nonnull` (since we could have a null
`dereferenceable(N)` pointer).

The motivating case for this change is Java (and other managed
languages), where pointers are either `null` or dereferenceable up to
some usually known-at-compile-time constant offset.

Reviewers: rafael, hfinkel

Reviewed By: hfinkel

Subscribers: nicholas, llvm-commits

Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D8650

git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@235132 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8


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