An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs

Rigger, Manuel; Marr, Stefan; Kell, Stephen; Leopoldseder, David; Mössenböck, Hanspeter

doi:10.1145/3186411.3186418

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Besides compiler builtins, C projects also contain other elements not specified by the C standard. Rigger et al found that around 30% of popular C projects use x86-64 inline assembly [53]. The current paper demonstrates that GCC builtins are used more frequently than inline assembly, which provides even stronger incentives to implement support by C tools.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 58%

“…On x86, which ranked next, the most common builtin was __builtin_cpu_supports followed by __builtin_cpu_init, which allow programmers to query the availability of CPU features such as SIMD support. In x86-64 inline assembly, the equivalent cpuid instruction ranked among the most commonly used instructions [53]. Other x86 builtins were quite diverse and less frequent.…”

Section: Rq2: For What Purposes Are Builtins Used?mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Understanding GCC builtins to develop better tools

Rigger¹,

Marr

Adams

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of

Self Cite

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C programs can use compiler builtins to provide functionality that the C language lacks. On Linux, GCC provides several thousands of builtins that are also supported by other mature compilers, such as Clang and ICC. Maintainers of other tools lack guidance on whether and which builtins should be implemented to support popular projects. To assist tool developers who want to support GCC builtins, we analyzed builtin use in 4,913 C projects from GitHub. We found that 37% of these projects relied on at least one builtin. Supporting an increasing proportion of projects requires support of an exponentially increasing number of builtins; however, implementing only 10 builtins already covers over 30% of the projects. Since we found that many builtins in our corpus remained unused, the effort needed to support 90% of the projects is moderate, requiring about 110 builtins to be implemented. For each project, we analyzed the evolution of builtin use over time and found that the majority of projects mostly added builtins. This suggests that builtins are not a legacy feature and must be supported in future tools. Systematic testing of builtin support in existing tools revealed that many lacked support for builtins either partially or completely; we also discovered incorrect implementations in various tools, including the formally verified CompCert compiler. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Language features; Compilers.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 58%

Section: Rq2: For What Purposes Are Builtins Used?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding GCC builtins to develop better tools

Rigger¹,

Marr

Adams

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The use of inline assembly is pretty widespreadwe estimate that 11% of Debian packages written in C/C++ directly or indirectly depends on inline assembly. It includes major projects like GMP and ffmpeg -Rigger et al [7] actually reports that 28% of the top rated C projects on GitHub uses inline assembly. We further estimate that 75% of the chunks found in Debian Jessie 8.11 (used in Sec.…”

Section: Background a Inline Assemblymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is supported by major C/C ++ compilers like GCC, clang or Visual Studio, and used quite regularly -usually for optimization or to access system-level features hidden by the host language. For example, we estimate that 11% of Debian packages written in C/C++ directly or indirectly depends on inline assembly, with chunks containing up to 500 instructions, while 28% of the top rated C projects on GitHub contains inline assembly according to Rigger et al [7]. As a matter of fact, inline assembly is a common engineering practice in key areas such as cryptography, multimedia or drivers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Get Rid of Inline Assembly through Verification-Oriented Lifting

Recoules

Bardin

Bonichon

et al. 2019

2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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Formal methods for software development have made great strides in the last two decades, to the point that their application in safety-critical embedded software is an undeniable success. Their extension to non-critical software is one of the notable forthcoming challenges. For example, C programmers regularly use inline assembly for low-level optimizations and system primitives. This usually results in rendering state-ofthe-art formal analyzers developed for C ineffective. We thus propose TINA, the first automated, generic, verification-friendly and trustworthy lifting technique turning inline assembly into semantically equivalent C code amenable to verification, in order to take advantage of existing C analyzers. Extensive experiments on real-world code (including GMP and ffmpeg) show the feasibility and benefits of TINA.Assuming no side-effect beyond those mentioned in output operands'. 1 # 54 "/usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/sys/select.h" 2 typedef long int __ fd _ mask; 3 4 # 64 "/usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/sys/select.h" 5 typedef struct { 6 __ fd _ mask __ fds _ bits[1024 / (8 * sizeof( __ fd _ mask))]; 7 } fd _ set; 8 9 # 1074 "socklib.c" 10 int udpc _ prepareForSelect 11 (int * socks, int nr, fd _ set * read _ set) 12 { 13 / * [...] * / 14 int maxFd; 15 do { 16 int __ d0, __ d1; 17 __ asm __ __ volatile __ 18 ("cld; rep; " "stosl" 19: "=c" ( __ d0), "=D" ( __ d1) 20 : "a" (0), 21 "0" (sizeof(fd _ set) / sizeof( __ fd _ mask)), 22 void sub _ median _ pred _ mmxext(uint8 _ t * dst, uint8 _ t const * src1,

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“…Therefore, this initial survey confirms the importance of GitHub stars to practitioners, when compared to forks and watchers. Additionally, stars are often used by researchers to select GitHub projects for empirical studies in software engineering [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Therefore, a throughout analysis of starring practices can shed light on the properties and risks involved in this selection.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform

Borges¹,

Valente²

2018

Journal of Systems and Software

205

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Besides a git-based version control system, GitHub integrates several social coding features. Particularly, GitHub users can star a repository, presumably to manifest interest or satisfaction with an open source project. However, the real and practical meaning of starring a project was never the subject of an in-depth and well-founded empirical investigation. Therefore, we provide in this paper a throughout study on the meaning, characteristics, and dynamic growth of GitHub stars. First, by surveying 791 developers, we report that three out of four developers consider the number of stars before using or contributing to a GitHub project. Then, we report a quantitative analysis on the characteristics of the top-5,000 most starred GitHub repositories. We propose four patterns to describe stars growth, which are derived after clustering the time series representing the number of stars of the studied repositories; we also reveal the perception of 115 developers about these growth patterns. To conclude, we provide a list of recommendations to open source project managers (e.g., on the importance of social media promotion) and to GitHub users and Software Engineering researchers (e.g., on the risks faced when selecting projects by GitHub stars).

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An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs

Cited by 12 publications

References 47 publications

Understanding GCC builtins to develop better tools

Understanding GCC builtins to develop better tools

Get Rid of Inline Assembly through Verification-Oriented Lifting

What’s in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform

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