Re: Urgent: x86-32 and GNU ld 2.22.52.0.1

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 12:20 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 05/18/2012 09:14 AM, H.J. Lu wrote:
>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 8:56 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> I need an urgent opinion.  It seems we have an epic mess on our hands.
>>>
>>> GNU ld 2.22.52.0.1 silently changed the semantics of section-relative
>>> symbols that are part of otherwise empty sections, and silently changes
>>> them to absolute.  We rely on section-relative symbols staying
>>> section-relative, and actually have several sections in the linker
>>> script solely for this purpose.
>>
>> That is I talked to you a couple days ago:
>>
>> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14052
>>
>
> I know, which was a very good thing... otherwise we'd probably not have
> tracked this down anywhere near as quickly.  Thank you.
>
> The problem is that this version of binutils made it into Fedora 17, and
> so we now have a large number of users with a known bad binutils in the
> field...

We've not seen many kernel bugs that would seem to be blamed on this as
of yet.  It does seem like a problem waiting to hit us once F17 goes GA
though.  My limited 32-bit F17 machine collection definitely shows the
__init_{begin,end} symbols being absolute, but they boot fine.  Likely
because the kernel isn't relocated on them.

For what it's worth, I've filed a bug against Fedora binutils here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=822981

josh
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/