Nikita Popov 92c55a315e
[IR] Only allow lifetime.start/end on allocas (#149310)
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.
2025-07-21 15:04:50 +02:00
..
2025-07-15 13:38:08 +01:00

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