A fresh look at optimizing array bound checking
PLDI '90 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation
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ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS)
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ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS)
Elimination of redundant array subscript range checks
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PLDI '98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation
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CASCON '99 Proceedings of the 1999 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
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DSN '05 Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
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SSYM'98 Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 7
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ASPLOS XVII Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
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The ability to check memory references against their associated array/buffer bounds helps programmers to detect programming errors involving address overruns early on and thus avoid many difficult bugs down the line. This paper proposes a novel approach called Boud to the array bounds checking problem that exploits the debug register hardware in modern CPUs. Boud allocates a debug register to monitor accesses to an array or buffer within a loop so that accesses stepping outside the array's or buffer's bound will trigger a breakpoint exeption. Because the number of debug registers is typically small, in cases when hardware bounds checking is not possible, Boud falls back to software bounds checking. Although Boud can effectively eliminate per-array-reference software checking overhead in most cases, it still incurs a fixed set-up overhead for each use of an array within a loop. This paper presents the detailed design and implementation of the Boud compiler, and a comprehensive evaluation of various performance tradeoffs associated with the proposed array bounds checking technique. For the set of real-world network applications we tested, including Apache, Sendmail, Bind, etc., the latency penalty of Boud's bounds checking mechanism is between 2.2% to 8.8%, respectively, when compared with the vanilla GCC compiler, which does not perform any bounds checking.