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From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2024 08:39:48 -0700
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wicV7y1wnZ0God6HLA-4YSVtEevuVf09t+t=bU4yQFfXg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: More annoying code generation by clang
To: Uros Bizjak <ubizjak@gmail.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>, 
	Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>, 
	"the arch/x86 maintainers" <x86@kernel.org>, Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Sat, 6 Apr 2024 at 05:30, Uros Bizjak <ubizjak@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> FYI, please note that gcc-12 is able to synthesize carry-flag compares
> on its own:

Oh, gcc has been able to do that for much longer than that. It's a
idiomatic i386 pattern, and gcc has generated it for as long as I can
remember.

HOWEVER.

There's a big difference between "able to" and "GUARANTEED to".

Because this code actually requires a data-depencency and not a
control dependency as a correctness issue because of Spectre-v1.

So while I know very well that gcc _can_ do it, I also know very well
that there are absolutely no guarantees that gcc won't use a
conditional branch instead.

So this code is needs to generate good code because it's actually
important code that shows up in benchmarks, but this code also needs
to generate a very _particular_ pattern of code, and it's not good
enough that gcc may "happen" to generate that pattern of code.

Thus the inline asm.

               Linus