Tuesday, September 16, 2014

::operator new[] overloading.

Let's try to run Foo and Bar classes under ARM Linux platform:


// Foo class
class Foo {
  public:
    Foo() { vec = my_value; }
    float32x4_t vec;
};

// Bar class
class Bar {
  public:
    Bar() { vec = my_value; }
    ~Bar() { } // this destructor is important
    float32x4_t vec;
};

// 16-byte alignment allocation
// this approach will work on all platforms!
void *operator new(size_t size) {
    return memalign(16,size);
}
void *operator new[](size_t size) {
    return memalign(16,size);
}

// everything is OK...
Foo *f0 = new Foo();
Bar *b0 = new Bar();
Foo *f1 = new Foo[1];

// Hello SIGBUS! where are you from?
Bar *b1 = new Bar[1];
// I'm from 8-byte cookie.

The f1 pointer has 16-byte alignment. But b1 pointer has 8-byte alignment. For a Bar class with non-default destructor compiler will save allocation size and class size inside the cookie.
The cookie size on non-__ARM_EABI__ platforms is max(sizeof(size_t) * 2,sizeof(Foo)).
The cookie size of __ARM_EABI__ platform is sizeof(size_t) * 2 and we can't change it.

We you should do with all your code which is using this approach on __ARB_EABI__??
The stupid straightforward solution is to return the wrong 8-byte alignment instead of 16-byte one for all Bar classes:


void *operator new[](size_t size) {
  #if defined(_LINUX) && defined(__ARM_EABI__)
    if(sizeof(size_t) == 4 && !IS_ALIGNED16(size)) {
      size += sizeof(size_t) * 2;
      return static_cast<size_t*>(memalign(16,size)) + 2;
    }
  #endif
  return memalign(16,size);
}

void operator delete(void *ptr) {
  #if defined(_LINUX) && defined(__ARM_EABI__)
    if(sizeof(size_t) == 4 && !IS_ALIGNED16(ptr)) {
      return free(static_cast<size_t*>(ptr) - 2);
    }
  #endif
  free(ptr);
}

4 comments:

  1. Why not just keep default new[]/delete[] operators and set proper alignment for float32x4_t via __attribute__((aligned(x)))?

    ReplyDelete
  2. __attribute__((aligned(x))) is not affect "operator new" behavior. The class address will be (byte*)(operator new[](size)) + 8 without respect to attribute.

    ReplyDelete
  3. https://bitcoindicegames.tumblr.com/

    ReplyDelete