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This post explores how GNU Assembler and LLVM integrated assembler generate relocations, an important step to generate a relocatable file. Relocations identify parts of instructions or data that cannot be fully determined during assembly because they depend on the final memory layout, which is only established at link time or load time. These are essentially placeholders that will be filled in (typically with absolute addresses or PC-relative offsets) during the linking process.

Relocation generation: the basics

Symbol references are the primary candidates for relocations. For instance, in the x86-64 instruction movl sym(%rip), %eax (GNU syntax), the assembler calculates the displacement between the program counter (PC) and sym. This distance affects the instruction's encoding and typically triggers a R_X86_64_PC32 relocation, unless sym is a local symbol defined within the current section.

Both the GNU assembler and LLVM integrated assembler utilize multiple passes during assembly, with several key phases relevant to relocation generation:

This post describes how to compile a single C++ source file to an object file with the Clang API. Here is the code. It behaves like a simplified clang executable that handles -c and -S.

LLVM 20 will be released. As usual, I maintain lld/ELF and have added some notes to https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/release/20.x/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.rst. I've meticulously reviewed nearly all the patches that are not authored by me. I'll delve into some of the key changes.

A dominator tree can be used to compute natural loops.

• For every node H in a post-order traversal of the dominator tree (or the original CFG), find all predecessors that are dominated by H. This identifies all back edges.
• Each back edge T->H identifies a natural loop with H as the header.
  • Perform a flood fill starting from T in the reversed dominator tree (from exiting block to header)
  • All visited nodes reachable from the root belong to the natural loop associated with the back edge. These nodes are guaranteed to be reachable from H due to the dominator property.
  • Visited nodes unreachable from the root should be ignored.
  • Loops associated with visited nodes are considered subloops.

Clang provides a few options to generate timing report. Among them, -ftime-report and -ftime-trace can be used to analyze the performance of Clang's internal passes.

• -fproc-stat-report records time and memory on spawned processes (ld, and gas if -fno-integrated-as).
• -ftime-trace, introduced in 2019, generates Clang timing information in the Chrome Trace Event format (JSON). The format supports nested events, providing a rich view of the front end.
• -ftime-report: The option name is borrowed from GCC.

This post focuses on the traditional -ftime-report, which uses a line-based textual format.

Understanding -ftime-report output

The output consists of information about multiple timer groups. The last group spans the largest interval and encompasses timing data from other groups.

Up to Clang 19, the last group is called "Clang front-end time report". You would see something like the following.

一如既往，主要在工具链领域耕耘。

Blogging

I have been busy creating posts, authoring a total of 31 blog posts (including this one). 7 posts resonated on Hacker News, garnering over 50 points. (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=maskray.me).

I have also revised many posts initially written between 2020 and 2024.

Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@meowray

In debuggers, stepping into a function with arguments that involve function calls may step into the nested function calls, even if they are simple and uninteresting, such as those found in the C++ STL.

GDB

Consider the following example:

#include <cstdio>
#include <memory>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;

void foo(int i, int j) {
  printf("%d %d\n", i, j);
}

int main() {
  auto i = make_unique<int>(3);
  vector v{1,2};
  foo(*i, v.back()); // step into
}

When GDB stops at the foo call, the step (s) command will step into std::vector::back and std::unique_ptr::operator*. While you can execute finish (fin) and then execute s again, it's time-consuming and distracting, especially when dealing with complex argument expressions.