Thread (8 messages) 8 messages, 4 authors, 2021-05-05

Re: Heads up: gcc miscompiling initramfs zlib decompression code at -O3

From: Oleksandr Natalenko <hidden>
Date: 2021-05-01 21:03:47
Also in: lkml

Hello.

On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 03:06:30PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 1:46 PM Vineet Gupta [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
I've hit a mainline gcc 10.2 (also gcc 9.3) bug which triggers at -O3
causing wrong codegen.
I'd be more than happy to just disable CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_PERFORMANCE_O3 entirely.
FWIW, we used to find real bugs using -O3 in the past [1].
The advantages are very questionable - with a lot of the optimizations
at O3 being about loops, something which the kernel to a close
approximation doesn't have.

Most kernel loops are "count on one hand" iterations, and loop
optimizations generally just make things worse.

And we've had problems with -O3 before, because not only are the
optimizations a bit esoteric, they are often relatively untested. If
you look around at various projects (outside the kernel), -O2 is
generally the "default".

And that's entirely ignoring the gcc history - where -O3 has often
been very buggy indeed. It's gotten much better, but I just don't see
the upside of using -O3.

In fact, it looks like we already have that

        depends on ARC

for -O3, exactly because nobody really wants to use this.

So this bug seems to be entirely ARC-specific, in that only ARC can
use -O3 for the kernel already.

             Linus
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/673b885183fb64f1cbb3ed2387524077@natalenko.name/ (local)

-- 
  Oleksandr Natalenko (post-factum)
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help