On some snapshots, notably ffmpeg, the IR `ValueNumbering` recursion
would generate billions of tuples and eventually run out of space.
It turns out it was fairly common for an `Instruction` to get more than
one `ValueNumber` in the base cases for `VariableAddressInstruction` and
`InitializeParameterInstruction`, and it could also happen in an
instruction with more than one operand of the same `OperandTag`. When a
binary operation was applied to an instruction with `m` value numbers
and another instruction with `n` value numbers, the result would get
`m * n` value numbers. This led to doubly-exponential growth in the
number of value numbers in rare cases.
The underlying reason why a `VariableAddressInstruction` could get
multiple value numbers is that it was keyed on the associated
`IRVariable`, and the `IRVariable` is defined in part by the type of its
underlying `Variable` (or other AST element). If the extractor defines a
variable to have multiple types because of linker ambiguity, this leads
to the creation of multiple `IRVariable`s. That should ideally be solved
in `TIRVariable.qll`, but for now I've put a workaround in
`ValueNumberingInternal.qll` instead.
To remove the problem with instructions having multiple operands, the
construction in `Operand.qll` will now filter out any such operand. It
wasn't enough to apply that filter to the `raw` stage, so I've applied
it to all three stages.
We were hitting a combinatorial explosion in `hasDefinitionAtRank` for functions that contain a large number of string literals. The problem was that every `Chi` instruction for `AliasedVirtualVariable` was treated as a definition of every string literal. We already mark string literals as `isReadOnly()`, but we were allowing `AliasedVirtualVariable` to define read-only locations so that the `AliasedDefinition` instruction would provide the initial definition for all string literals.
To fix this, I've introduced the new `InitializeNonLocal` instruction, which is inserted in the prologue of every function right after `AliasedDefinition`. It provides the initial definition for every non-stack memory location, including read-only locations, but is never written to anywhere else. It is the conterpart of the `AliasedUse` instruction in the function epilogue, which represents the use of all non-stack memory after the function returns. I considered renaming `AliasedUse` to `ReturnNonLocal`, to match the `InitializeXXX`/`ReturnXXX` pattern we already use for parameters and indirections, but held off to avoid unnecessary churn. Any thoughts on whether I should make this name change?
This change has a significant speedup in evaluation time for a few of our troublesome databases:
`attnam/ivan`: 13%
`awslabs/s2n`: 26%
`SinaMostafanejad/OpenRDM`: 7%
`zcoinofficial/zcoin`: 8%
Instead of tracking `IRVariable`s directly, alias analysis now tracks instances of the `Allocation` type provided by its `Configuration` parameter. For unaliased SSA, an `Allocation` is just an `IRAutomaticVariable`. For aliased SSA, an `Allocation` is either an `IRVariable` or the memory pointed to by an indirect parameter.
