Comment 11 for bug 727064

Created attachment 5264
Example patch to give the basic idea

I realize that it's technically "undefined", but the behavior has changed, and in the process broken existing binaries. It's a common bug to use memcpy() instead of memmove(), and the traditional behavior of "copy upwards" means that that bug can go unnoticed for a *long* time if the memory move moves things downwards.

The change was introduced in commit 6fb8cbcb58a29fff73eb2101b34caa19a7f88eba ("Improve 64bit memcpy/memmove for Atom, Core 2 and Core i7"), which was part of the 2.13 release.

As a result, upgrading from Fedora-13 to Fedora-14 caused applications like flash to fail. But it's a bug that has been reported for other applications too (and it's a bug that I've personally introduced in 'git' too - happily, people had run things like valgrind, so I don't know of any _current_ cases of it).

And there is absolutely _zero_ reason to not handle overlapping areas correctly. The "undefined behavior" is due to historical implementation issues, not because it's better than just doing the right thing.

And now applications will randomly do different things depending on the phase of the moon (technically, depending on which CPU they have and what particular version of memcpy() glibc happens to choose).

So from a pure Quality-of-Implementation standpoint, just make glibc implement memcpy() as memmove(), if you don't want to re-instate the traditional behavior that binaries have at least been tested with. Don't break random existing binaries just because the glibc version changed, and they had never been tested with the new random behavior!

I'm attaching an EXAMPLE patch against the current glibc git tree: it just tries to get rid of the unnecessary differences between memcpy and memmove for the normal ssse3 case. The approach is simple:

 - small copies (less than 80 bytes) have hand-coded optimized code that gets called through a jump table. Those cases already handle overlapping areas correctly (simply because they do all loads up-front, and stores at the end), and they are used for memmove() as-is.

   So change the memcpy() function to test for the small case first, since that's the one that can be latency critical.

 - once we're talking about bigger memcpy() cases, the extra couple of cycles to check "which direction should I copy" are totally immaterial, and having two different versions of basically the same code is just silly and is quite likely to cost more than (in I$ and page fault overhead) than just doing it in the same code. So just remove all the USE_AS_MEMMOVE games.

I haven't actually tested the patch, since building glibc is black magic and the simple "just alias __memmove_ssse3 to __memcpy_sse3" thing didn't work for me and resulted in linker errors. There's probably some simple (but subtle) magic reason for that, that I simply don't know about.

So take the patch as a "hey, doing it this way should be simpler and avoid the problem" rather than "apply this patch as-is". The ssse3-back case (which prefers backwards copies) needs similar treatment, I'll happily do that and test it if people just let me know that it's worth my time (and tell me what the black magic incantation is).