
lifetime.start and lifetime.end are primarily intended for use on allocas, to enable stack coloring and other liveness optimizations. This is necessary because all (static) allocas are hoisted into the entry block, so lifetime markers are the only way to convey the actual lifetimes. However, lifetime.start and lifetime.end are currently *allowed* to be used on non-alloca pointers. We don't actually do this in practice, but just the mere fact that this is possible breaks the core purpose of the lifetime markers, which is stack coloring of allocas. Stack coloring can only work correctly if all lifetime markers for an alloca are analyzable. * If a lifetime marker may operate on multiple allocas via a select/phi, we don't know which lifetime actually starts/ends and handle it incorrectly (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/104776). * Stack coloring operates on the assumption that all lifetime markers are visible, and not, for example, hidden behind a function call or escaped pointer. It's not possible to change this, as part of the purpose of lifetime markers is that they work even in the presence of escaped pointers, where simple use analysis is insufficient. I don't think there is any way to have coherent semantics for lifetime markers on allocas, while also permitting them on arbitrary pointer values. This PR restricts lifetimes to operate on allocas only. As a followup, I will also drop the size argument, which is superfluous if we always operate on an alloca. (This change also renders various code handling lifetime markers on non-alloca dead. I plan to clean up that kind of code after dropping the size argument as well.) In practice, I've only found a few places that currently produce lifetimes on non-allocas: * CoroEarly replaces the promise alloca with the result of an intrinsic, which will later be replaced back with an alloca. I think this is the only place where there is some legitimate loss of functionality, but I don't think this is particularly important (I don't think we'd expect the promise in a coroutine to admit useful lifetime optimization.) * SafeStack moves unsafe allocas onto a separate frame. We can safely drop lifetimes here, as SafeStack performs its own stack coloring. * Similar for AddressSanitizer, it also moves allocas into separate memory. * LSR sometimes replaces the lifetime argument with a GEP chain of the alloca (where the offsets ultimately cancel out). This is just unnecessary. (Fixed separately in https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/149492.) * InferAddrSpaces sometimes makes lifetimes operate on an addrspacecast of an alloca. I don't think this is necessary.
LLVM Documentation ================== LLVM's documentation is written in reStructuredText, a lightweight plaintext markup language (file extension `.rst`). While the reStructuredText documentation should be quite readable in source form, it is mostly meant to be processed by the Sphinx documentation generation system to create HTML pages which are hosted on <https://llvm.org/docs/> and updated after every commit. Manpage output is also supported, see below. If you instead would like to generate and view the HTML locally, install Sphinx <http://sphinx-doc.org/> and then do: cd <build-dir> cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_HTML=true <src-dir> make -j3 docs-llvm-html $BROWSER <build-dir>/docs/html/index.html The mapping between reStructuredText files and generated documentation is `docs/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//html/Foo.html` <-> `https://llvm.org/docs/Foo.html`. If you are interested in writing new documentation, you will want to read `SphinxQuickstartTemplate.rst` which will get you writing documentation very fast and includes examples of the most important reStructuredText markup syntax. Manpage Output =============== Building the manpages is similar to building the HTML documentation. The primary difference is to use the `man` makefile target, instead of the default (which is `html`). Sphinx then produces the man pages in the directory `<build-dir>/docs/man/`. cd <build-dir> cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_MAN=true <src-dir> make -j3 docs-llvm-man man -l <build-dir>/docs/man/FileCheck.1 The correspondence between .rst files and man pages is `docs/CommandGuide/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//man/Foo.1`. These .rst files are also included during HTML generation so they are also viewable online (as noted above) at e.g. `https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/Foo.html`. Checking links ============== The reachability of external links in the documentation can be checked by running: cd llvm/docs/ sphinx-build -b linkcheck . _build/lintcheck/ # report will be generated in _build/lintcheck/output.txt Doxygen page Output ============== Install doxygen <https://www.doxygen.nl/download.html> and dot2tex <https://dot2tex.readthedocs.io/en/latest>. cd <build-dir> cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=On <llvm-top-src-dir> make doxygen-llvm # for LLVM docs make doxygen-clang # for clang docs It will generate html in <build-dir>/docs/doxygen/html # for LLVM docs <build-dir>/tools/clang/docs/doxygen/html # for clang docs