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Description of problem: GCC 4.3.0 generates movdqa instructions referencing non-aligned memory when optimizing with "-O3 -march=core2". The documentation for movdqa says that the mmemory location must be 16-byte aligned, but GCC is only aligning to 8 bytes. The improperly aligned memory location causes a crash. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gcc-4.3.0-8 How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: Build Firefox 3 trunk with "-O3 -march=core2". The pow5mult routine in jsdtoa.c will be have the bad movdqa instructions, and Firefox will crash on startup. Actual results: Crash! Additional info: Could ensure that memory is properly aligned or could use the movdqu instruction which does not require alignment
The assembly in question looks like: movdqa %xmm0, -200(%ebp) movl p5s_lock@GOTOFF(%ebx), %eax movl %eax, (%esp) call PR_Unlock@PLT movl -28(%ebp), %esi movdqa -200(%ebp), %xmm0 It looks like the compiler is trying to preserve the value of %xmm0 across function calls. The offset used by all the examples of this is -200, which is not 16-byte aligned. I should also note that I am running x86 F9.
Then likely firefox is buggy. -200(%ebp) must be 16-byte aligned. The ABI says that %esp should be 16-byte aligned right before the call instruction is executed (i.e. first argument passed on the stack is 16-byte aligned). But the call instruction pushes 4 bytes (the return address) and in the function prologue: pushl %ebp movl %esp, %ebp another 4 bytes are pushed. So, for functions that use frame pointer %ebp is supposed to satisfy ((%ebp + 8) & 15) == 0. Therefore, %ebp - 200 is also 16-byte aligned. AFAIK Firefox contains bridges written in assembly, so that's most likely the place which doesn't honor the ABI and misaligns the stack. To my knowledge all similar issues on the glibc side (e.g. in clone/pthread_create, or makecontext, have been fixed quite some time ago). Should be fairly easy to find out, run it in the debugger, see where the misaligned access is done, and go up through the backtrace, checking whether the stack pointer is aligned properly in each frame, in some lower frames it will be most likely misaligned, in start_thread or main it should be aligned properly. Until that is fixed in firefox, you just can't build firefox with the vectorizer on (enabled at -O3 plus CPU selection for SSE/SSE2 support). OT, -O3 is really meant to be used for performance critical code, if you build a huge app like firefox with -O3, you'll see most likely performance degradation due to much increased cache footprint.
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