Prevent alias from pointing to weak aliases.

Aliases are just another name for a position in a file. As such, the
regular symbol resolutions are not applied. For example, given

define void @my_func() {
  ret void
}
@my_alias = alias weak void ()* @my_func
@my_alias2 = alias void ()* @my_alias

We produce without this patch:

        .weak   my_alias
my_alias = my_func
        .globl  my_alias2
my_alias2 = my_alias

That is, in the resulting ELF file my_alias, my_func and my_alias are
just 3 names pointing to offset 0 of .text. That is *not* the
semantics of IR linking. For example, linking in a

@my_alias = alias void ()* @other_func

would require the strong my_alias to override the weak one and
my_alias2 would end up pointing to other_func.

There is no way to represent that with aliases being just another
name, so the best solution seems to be to just disallow it, converting
a miscompile into an error.

git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@204781 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/LangRef.rst b/docs/LangRef.rst
index c959f56ef1..b0b8bfebee 100644
--- a/docs/LangRef.rst
+++ b/docs/LangRef.rst
@@ -681,6 +681,10 @@ the aliasee.
 
 The aliasee must be a definition.
 
+Aliases are not allowed to point to aliases with linkages that can be
+overridden. Since they are only a second name, the possibility of the
+intermediate alias being overridden cannot be represented in an object file.
+
 .. _namedmetadatastructure:
 
 Named Metadata