More on in-memory zeroisation

[Dave Korn]

  I've been through the code.  As far as I can see, there's nothing in
expand_builtin_memset_args that treats any value differently, so there can't be
anything special about memset(x, 0, y).  Also as far as I can tell, gcc doesn't
optimise out calls to memset, not even thoroughly dead ones: for example -


/artimi/software/firmware $ cat memstst.c

#include <string.h>
int foo (void);
int main (int argc, const char **argv)
{
  int var[100];
  memset (var, 0, sizeof var);
  foo ();
  return 0;
}

int foo (void)
{
  int var[100];
  memset (var, 0, sizeof var);
  return 0;
}

/artimi/software/firmware $ gcc -O2 memstst.c -o mt
/artimi/software/firmware $ gcc -O2 memstst.c -S -o memstst.s
/artimi/software/firmware $ grep memset memstst.s
        call    _memset
        call    _memset
        .def    _memset;        .scl    3;      .type   32;     .endef
/artimi/software/firmware $


  This is not entirely unexpected; memset, even when expanded inline as a
builtin, still has libcall behaviour.

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....

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