lib: make memzero_explicit more robust against dead store elimination

In commit 0b053c951829 ("lib: memzero_explicit: use barrier instead of OPTIMIZER_HIDE_VAR"), we made memzero_explicit() more robust in case LTO would decide to inline memzero_explicit() and eventually find out it could be elimiated as dead store. While using barrier() works well for the case of gcc, recent efforts from LLVMLinux people suggest to use llvm as an alternative to gcc, and there, Stephan found in a simple stand-alone user space example that llvm could nevertheless optimize and thus elimitate the memset(). A similar issue has been observed in the referenced llvm bug report, which is regarded as not-a-bug. Based on some experiments, icc is a bit special on its own, while it doesn't seem to eliminate the memset(), it could do so with an own implementation, and then result in similar findings as with llvm. The fix in this patch now works for all three compilers (also tested with more aggressive optimization levels). Arguably, in the current kernel tree it's more of a theoretical issue, but imho, it's better to be pedantic about it. It's clearly visible with gcc/llvm though, with the below code: if we would have used barrier() only here, llvm would have omitted clearing, not so with barrier_data() variant: static inline void memzero_explicit(void *s, size_t count) { memset(s, 0, count); barrier_data(s); } int main(void) { char buff[20]; memzero_explicit(buff, sizeof(buff)); return 0; } $ gcc -O2 test.c $ gdb a.out (gdb) disassemble main Dump of assembler code for function main: 0x0000000000400400 <+0>: lea -0x28(%rsp),%rax 0x0000000000400405 <+5>: movq $0x0,-0x28(%rsp) 0x000000000040040e <+14>: movq $0x0,-0x20(%rsp) 0x0000000000400417 <+23>: movl $0x0,-0x18(%rsp) 0x000000000040041f <+31>: xor %eax,%eax 0x0000000000400421 <+33>: retq End of assembler dump. $ clang -O2 test.c $ gdb a.out (gdb) disassemble main Dump of assembler code for function main: 0x00000000004004f0 <+0>: xorps %xmm0,%xmm0 0x00000000004004f3 <+3>: movaps %xmm0,-0x18(%rsp) 0x00000000004004f8 <+8>: movl $0x0,-0x8(%rsp) 0x0000000000400500 <+16>: lea -0x18(%rsp),%rax 0x0000000000400505 <+21>: xor %eax,%eax 0x0000000000400507 <+23>: retq End of assembler dump. As gcc, clang, but also icc defines __GNUC__, it's sufficient to define this in compiler-gcc.h only to be picked up. For a fallback or otherwise unsupported compiler, we define it as a barrier. Similarly, for ecc which does not support gcc inline asm.

DBDaniel Borkmann committed 11 years ago