Any way to disable the alignment of functions?

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Hi,

I am trying to test if disabling function (entry) alignment has any effect on performance. On my x86 machine, all functions seem to get aligned to 16-bytes.
I know that GCC provides a flag (-fno-align-functions) to disable function alignment. However, I could not find the similar flag for clang.
According to the following quote from LLVM doc, clang delegates the job to the target in case no attributes are specified for a function.

"An explicit alignment may be specified for a function. If not present, or if the alignment is set to zero, the alignment of the function is set by the target to whatever it feels convenient.”

So, as a first try, I dived into the “EmitAlignment” code in AsmPrinter.cpp and simply removed the function alignment part. Interestingly the compilation seems flawless at many cases (large programs) but on a few programs, it produces a segfault-generating executable. So my guess is that for some functions, alignment is necessary for soundness, not just performance.

regards

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p.s.

It seems that adding the “OptimizeForSize” attribute to every function causes that function to be aligned with the minimum alignment required by the target.

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that REQUIRES alignment of the instruction itself. I'd be interested to see
what code it is that causes this (not that I'll be able to fix it, but just
out of curiosity, and perhaps it will help someone who can fix it...)

As to the original question, does -Os not do what you need?

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I would definitely expect it to break most C++ programs, because the C++ ABI uses the low bit to distinguish between function pointers and pointers to members. Other code may also assume that functions start on an n>1 byte boundary and reuse the low bits for other things. If a valid function pointer has its low bit set, then you may end up masking it off in some other code and then jumping to one byte into the first instruction. This being x86, that may still be a valid instruction sequence, but it’s almost certainly not a sensible one.

David

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Dear Mats and David,
Sorry for my late response.
David is right. The problem only appears in C++ code.