Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

On 11/30/2017 05:30 PM, Michael Davidsaver wrote:
> On 11/30/2017 06:33 AM, Dirk Zimoch wrote:
>> On 29.11.2017 20:51, Michael Davidsaver wrote: I will do some tests
>> to find out if I can remove the warnings. If not, I will add the
>> -fno-strict-aliasing compiler option to my architectures which use
>> older compilers and to the vxWorks configuration in EPICS.
> 
> Fair enough for PSI, though to be clear I wouldn't want this in Base
> without some identified mis-behavior. I've read a lot of people
> worrying theoretically about -fstrict-aliasing, but the only specific
> cases of actual mis-behavior I can find have to do with cases where a
> function has two pointer arguments of different types, which happen
> to point to the same memory.

In our control system we had a case of a function misbehaving due to
strict aliasing. The code was this (yes, this is a horrible hack):

long castToFloat(struct subRecord *psub)
{
    long lval = psub->a;
    psub->val = *((float*)(&lval));
    return(0);
}

The cross-compilers for RTEMS-4.9 (gcc 4.3.2) and RTEMS-4.10 (gcc 4.4.7)
show the warning and generate code that does not behave as intended.
Changing it to

long castToFloat(struct subRecord *psub)
{
    union {
        epicsInt32 lval;
        float fval;
    } lorf;
    lorf.lval = psub->a;
    psub->val = lorf.fval;
}

made the warning go away and repaires the intended behavior (whatever
that may be; the only thing I know is that the code worked on our
ancient cross-compiler for VxWorks-5.4.2).

Cheers
Ben
-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams

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References:

warnings about strict aliasing Dirk Zimoch

Re: warnings about strict aliasing Michael Davidsaver

Re: warnings about strict aliasing Dirk Zimoch

Re: warnings about strict aliasing Michael Davidsaver

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