shafik

What is the Strict Aliasing Rule and Why do we care?

(OR Type Punning, Undefined Behavior and Alignment, Oh My!)

What is strict aliasing? First we will describe what is aliasing and then we can learn what being strict about it means.

In C and C++ aliasing has to do with what expression types we are allowed to access stored values through. In both C and C++ the standard specifies which expression types are allowed to alias which types. The compiler and optimizer are allowed to assume we follow the aliasing rules strictly, hence the term strict aliasing rule. If we attempt to access a value using a type not allowed it is classified as undefined behavior(UB). Once we have undefined behavior all bets are off, the results of our program are no longer reliable.

Unfortunately with strict aliasing violations, we will often obtain the results we expect, leaving the possibility the a future version of a compiler with a new optimization will break code we th

CMCDragonkai

Understanding the Memory Layout of Linux Executables

Required tools for playing around with memory:

• hexdump
• objdump
• readelf
• xxd
• gcore

orlp

int64_t ipow(int64_t base, uint8_t exp) {
    static const uint8_t highest_bit_set[] = {
        0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3,
        4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4,
        5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5,
        5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5,
        6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6,
        6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6,
        6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6,
        6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 255, // anything past 63 is a guaranteed overflow with base > 1

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD