In two previous posts, I looked into cleaning the stack frame of a
function before using it by adding assembly at the beginning of each
function. This was done either by modifying LLVM with a custom
codegen pass or by
rewriting the
assembly
between the compiler and the assembler. The current implementation
adds a loop at the beginning of every function. We look at the impact
of this modification on the performance on the application.
In order to help the SimGridMC state comparison code, I wrote a
proof-of-concept LLVM pass which cleans each stack
frame before using
it. However, SimGridMC currently does not work properly when compiled
with clang/LLVM. We can do the same thing by pre-processing the
assembly generated by the compiler before passing it to the linker:
this is done by inserting a script between the compiler and the
assembler. This script will rewrite the generated assembly by
prepending stack-cleaning code at the beginning of each function.
In the previous episode, we implemented a LLVM pass which does
nothing. Now we are trying to modify
this to create a (proof-of-concept) LLVM pass which fills the current
stack frame with zero before using it.
The SimGrid model checker uses memory introspection (of the heap,
stack and global variables) in order to detect the equality of the
state of a distributed application at the different nodes of its
execution graph. One difficulty is to deal with uninitialised
variables. The uninitialised global variables are usually not a big
problem as their initial value is 0. The heap variables are dealt with
by memseting to 0 the content of the buffers returned by malloc
and friends. The case of uninitialised stack variables is more
problematic as their value is whatever was at this place on the stack
before. In order to evaluate the impact of those uninitialised
variables, we would like to clean each stack frame before using
them. This could be done with a LLVM plugin. Here is my first attempt
to write a LLVM pass to modify the code of a function.
I had a few Joomla posts that I wanted to clean up semi-automatically.
Here are a few scripts, to pass the content of the clipboard (or the
current selection) through a UNIX filter.
There are some good
plugins to
export Joomla content to WordPress. However, the free version does not
rewrite the URIs. It is quite simple to read the Joomla database and
generates a bunch of Apache Redirect directives.
The Wine 🍷 wiki
has instructions for building a shared WoW64
Wine :
this needs two out of source builds. The issue is that some
developement packages are not multiarch co-installable. Another wiki
page for Ubuntu recommends setting up a 32-bit
LXC. Here is how
I did it without a 32-bit container on Debian 🍥 testing.
In the previous episode, I talked about the
implementation of a same-page-merging page store. On top of this, we
can build same-page-merging snapshots for the SimGrid model checker.
The first (lower) layer of the per-page snapshot mechanism is a page
store: its responsibility is to store immutable shareable
reference-counted memory pages independently of the snapshoting
logic. Snapshot management and representation, soft-dirty tracking
will be handled in higher layer.