Support for variadic functions

[ercoppa]

Consider this function:

int variadic_foo(int count, ...) {
  va_list args;
  int i;

  va_start(args, count);

  int sum = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < count; i++)
    sum += va_arg(args, int);

  va_end(args);
  return (int)sum;
}

SymCC will not propagate symbolic expressions on arguments obtained through va_arg. Hence, SymCC will not, e.g., flip a branch that depends on the return value of variadic_function.

In SymFusion, we handle this by reverse engineering va_list, whose implementation is architecture specific: see, e.g., Section 3.34 in the AMD64 ABI. In particular, SymFusion instruments intrinsic va_start, adding a helper that "moves" at running time the symbolic expression for the i-th argument into the memory area where the program will read the i-th argument using va_arg (which is a C macro... hence, it is not an intrinsic). In SymFusion, we explicitly have information about the number of arguments and their types (integer vs floating point), making the implementation of this helper easier.

How do you think we should handle this in SymCC?

[Sebastian Poeplau]

That's an interesting question. There's an LLVM instruction va_arg, but I'll have to look into it a bit more...