Strange behavior with gcc inline assembly

Question

When inlining assembly in gcc, I find myself regularly having to add empty asm blocks in order to keep variables alive in earlier blocks, for example:

asm("rcr $1,%[borrow];"
    "movq 0(%[b_],%[i],8),%%rax;"
    "adcq %%rax,0(%[r_top],%[i],8);"
    "rcl $1,%[borrow];"
    : [borrow]"+r"(borrow)
    : [i]"r"(i),[b_]"r"(b_.data),[r_top]"r"(r_top.data)
    : "%rax","%rdx");

asm("" : : "r"(borrow) : ); // work-around to keep borrow alive ...

Another example of weirdness is that the code below works great without optimizations, but with -O3 it seg-faults:

ulong carry = 0,hi = 0,qh = s.data[1],ql = s.data[0];
asm("movq 0(%[b]),%%rax;"
    "mulq %[ql];"
    "movq %%rax,0(%[sb]);"
    "movq %%rdx,%[hi];"
    : [hi]"=r"(hi)
    : [ql]"r"(ql),[b]"r"(b.data),[sb]"r"(sb.data)
    : "%rax","%rdx","memory");
for (long i = 1; i < b.size; i++)
{
    asm("movq 0(%[b],%[i],8),%%rax;"
        "mulq %[ql];"
        "xorq %%r10,%%r10;"
        "addq %%rax,%[hi];"
        "adcq %%rdx,%[carry];"
        "adcq $0,%%r10;"
        "movq -8(%[b],%[i],8),%%rax;"
        "mulq %[qh];"
        "addq %%rax,%[hi];"
        "adcq %%rdx,%[carry];"
        "adcq $0,%%r10;"
        "movq %[hi],0(%[sb],%[i],8);"
        "movq %[carry],%[hi];"
        "movq %%r10,%[carry];"
        : [carry]"+r"(carry),[hi]"+r"(hi)
        : [i]"r"(i),[ql]"r"(ql),[qh]"r"(qh),[b]"r"(b.data),[sb]"r"(sb.data)
        : "%rax","%rdx","%r10","memory");
}
asm("movq -8(%[b],%[i],8),%%rax;"
    "mulq %[qh];"
    "addq %%rax,%[hi];"
    "adcq %%rdx,%[carry];"
    "movq %[hi],0(%[sb],%[i],8);"
    "movq %[carry],8(%[sb],%[i],8);"
    : [hi]"+r"(hi),[carry]"+r"(carry)
    : [i]"r"(long(b.size)),[qh]"r"(qh),[b]"r"(b.data),[sb]"r"(sb.data)
    : "%rax","%rdx","memory");

I think it has to do with the fact that it's using so many registers. Is there something I'm missing here or is the register allocation just really buggy with gcc inline assembly?

Answer 1

What you're missing is that GCC's optimiser will assume that the only side-effect of an asm block is to change the output operands. If those operands are not subsequently used, it may assume that the asm block in unnecessary and can be deleted.

e.g. in your first example, if borrow is not subsequently used, it is free to assume that there is no point in including the asm block at all, because its only side-effect is to update a variable that is never used again. And in the second example, if hi and carry are not used again after the code you've shown, it will probably infer that it can delete pretty much everything!

You can tell GCC that your inline assembly blocks should not be deleted by writing asm volatile(...) instead of just asm(...).

For more detail about this, see http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Extended-Asm.html (about half-way down the page).