zygoloid wrote:

> Uh, why are we allowed to assume that memcpy pointer arguments are aligned? 
> This looks like a miscompile to me.

This is definitely a bit weird, but...

> A plain `int *` pointer is not required to be aligned, and memcpy works on 
> `void *` pointers, so I'm not sure where an alignment requirement would 
> appear from.

... a plain `int *` pointer *is* sort of required to be aligned. Per 
https://eel.is/c++draft/expr.static.cast#14.sentence-2 (and similar wording 
exists in C), you get an unspecified pointer value if you cast an unaligned 
pointer to `int *`, which is allowed to be an invalid pointer value, which we 
are then permitted to give whatever semantics we like, such as disallowing it 
being passed to `memcpy`.

Clang generally chooses to define the semantics of misaligned pointer values as 
doing the "obvious" thing (@rjmccall circulated an RFC on this a few years 
ago). In short: we allow them to be formed, and we allow pointer arithmetic on 
them, but don't allow them to be used to actually access misaligned memory. But 
`memcpy` is a memory access, so if you directly pass an `int *` to it, I think 
we're following our rules if we require it to be aligned. And it seems like a 
valuable thing to assume: in the vast majority of cases, it is reasonable to 
assume `T`'s alignment when a `T*` is passed to `memcpy`.

I think the choice we're making here is probably worth it, though we should 
probably document it better. I think you can remove the alignment assumption by 
explicitly casting the operands to `char*` before passing them to `memcpy`; if 
you can't, I'd be more worried that we're doing something problematic here. 
Also, it'd seem like a good idea to make the sanitizer message as clear as 
possible for this case, because Clang's behavior here is surprising.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/67766
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