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9 changes: 8 additions & 1 deletion clang/docs/BoundsSafety.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -996,4 +996,11 @@ and the soundness of the type system. This may incur significant code size
overhead in unoptimized builds and leaving some of the adoption mistakes to be
caught only at run time. This is not a fundamental limitation, however, because
incrementally adding necessary static analysis will allow us to catch issues
early on and remove unnecessary bounds checks in unoptimized builds.
early on and remove unnecessary bounds checks in unoptimized builds.

Try it out
==========

Your feedback on the programming model is valuable. You may want to follow the
instruction in :doc:`BoundsSafetyAdoptionGuide` to play with ``-fbounds-safety``
and please send your feedback to `Yeoul Na <mailto:[email protected]>`_.
90 changes: 90 additions & 0 deletions clang/docs/BoundsSafetyAdoptionGuide.rst
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@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
======================================
Adoption Guide for ``-fbounds-safety``
======================================

.. contents::
:local:

Where to get ``-fbounds-safety``
================================

The open sourcing to llvm.org's ``llvm-project`` is still on going and the
feature is not available yet. In the mean time, the preview implementation is
available
`here <https://github.com/swiftlang/llvm-project/tree/stable/20240723>`_ in a
fork of ``llvm-project``. Please follow
`Building LLVM with CMake <https://llvm.org/docs/CMake.html>`_ to build the
compiler.

Feature flag
============

Pass ``-fbounds-safety`` as a Clang compilation flag for the C file that you
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@rapidsna I thought -fbound-safety was broken in open source? I thought people needed to do -Xclang -fbounds-safety.. or something like that?

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@rapidsna rapidsna Jan 16, 2025

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No. -fbounds-safety is available as a driver option in the preview implementation (in the fork of llvm-project).

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Note that the purpose of this document is to instruct people on how to use the preview implementation.

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Suggested change
Pass ``-fbounds-safety`` as a Clang compilation flag for the C file that you
Pass ``-Xclang -fbounds-safety`` as a Clang compilation flag for the C file that you

want to adopt. We recommend adopting the model file by file, because adoption
requires some effort to add bounds annotations and fix compiler diagnostics.

Include ``ptrcheck.h``
======================

``ptrcheck.h`` is a Clang toolchain header to provide definition of the bounds
annotations such as ``__counted_by``, ``__counted_by_or_null``, ``__sized_by``,
etc. In the LLVM source tree, the header is located in
``llvm-project/clang/lib/Headers/ptrcheck.h``.


Add bounds annotations on pointers as necessary
===============================================

Annotate pointers on struct fields and function parameters if they are pointing
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Nit: They might need to annotate globals and local variables too.

to an array of object, with appropriate bounds annotations. Please see
:doc:`BoundsSafety` to learn what kind of bounds annotations are available and
their semantics. Note that local pointer variables typically don't need bounds
annotations because they are implicitely a wide pointer (``__bidi_indexable``)
that automatically carries the bounds information.

Address compiler diagnostics
============================

Once you pass ``-fbounds-safety`` to compiler a C file, you will see some new
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Suggested change
Once you pass ``-fbounds-safety`` to compiler a C file, you will see some new
Once you pass ``-Xclang -fbounds-safety`` to compiler C file, you will see some new

compiler warnings and errors, which guide adoption of ``-fbounds-safety``.
Consider the following example:

.. code-block:: c

#include <ptrcheck.h>

void init_buf(int *p, int n) {
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
p[i] = 0; // error: array subscript on single pointer 'p' must use a constant index of 0 to be in bounds
}

The parameter ``int *p`` doesn't have a bounds annotation, so the compiler will
complain about the code indexing into it (``p[i]``) as it assumes that ``p`` is
pointing to a single ``int`` object or null. To address the diagnostics, you
should add a bounds annotation on ``int *p`` so that the compiler can reason
about the safety of the array subscript. In the following example, ``p`` is now
``int *__counted_by(n)``, so the compiler will allow the array subscript with
additional run-time checks as necessary.

.. code-block:: c

#include <ptrcheck.h>

void init_buf(int *__counted_by(n) p, int n) {
for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
p[i] = 0; // ok; `p` is now has a type with bounds annotation.
}

Run test suites to fix new run-time traps
=========================================

Adopting ``-fbounds-safety`` may cause your program to trap if it violates
bounds safety or it has incorrect adoption. Thus, it is necessary to perform
run-time testing of your program to gain confidence that it won't trap at
run time.

Repeat the process for each remaining file
==========================================

Once you've done with adopting a single C file, please repeat the same process
for each remaining C file that you want to adopt.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions clang/docs/index.rst
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Expand Up @@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ Using Clang as a Compiler
SanitizerStats
SanitizerSpecialCaseList
BoundsSafety
BoundsSafetyAdoptionGuide
BoundsSafetyImplPlans
ControlFlowIntegrity
LTOVisibility
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