Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Static calls

From: Ard Biesheuvel
Date: Sun Nov 11 2018 - 08:46:16 EST


On 11 November 2018 at 00:20, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 02:50:27PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> On 9 November 2018 at 08:28, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> - I'm not sure about the objtool approach. Objtool is (currently)
>> >> x86-64 only, which means we have to use the "unoptimized" version
>> >> everywhere else. I may experiment with a GCC plugin instead.
>> >
>> > I'd prefer the objtool approach. It's a pretty reliable first-principles
>> > approach while GCC plugin would have to be replicated for Clang and any
>> > other compilers, etc.
>> >
>>
>> I implemented the GCC plugin approach here for arm64
>
> I'm confused; I though we only needed objtool for variable instruction
> length architectures, because we can't reliably decode our instruction
> stream. Otherwise we can fairly trivially use the DWARF relocation data,
> no?

How would that work? We could build vmlinux with --emit-relocs, filter
out the static jump/call relocations and resolve the symbol names to
filter the ones associated with calls to trampolines. But then, we
have to build the static_call_sites section and reinject it back into
the image in some way, which is essentially objtool, no?