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Re: Read-only data in ELF libraries may be remapped writable at runtime (upcoming NDSS'17 paper)


On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 11:47:02AM -0800, Richard Henderson wrote:
> On 12/27/2016 09:48 PM, Cary Coutant wrote:
> >Nevertheless, I'd like to suggest that we're fixing the wrong problem.
> >Copy relocations have many problems, and I think we should focus more
> >on simply eliminating them entirely. The paper talks about that, but
> >only to the extent of using -fpic, which is overkill. It talks about
> >how Windows and macOS deal with the problem, but it overlooks some
> >other Unix platforms like HP-UX that do not use copy relocations at
> >all.
> >
> >On HP-UX, the compiler can be told to assume that any undefined data
> >symbol may be external to the load module, and generates an indirect
> >reference through the linkage table (aka, GOT). The linker is able to
> >rewrite the indirect reference as a direct reference if it determines
> >that the reference is within the same load module. The rewritten
> >sequence involves an extra register copy, but eliminates a much more
> >expensive memory load. The compiler can also make the opposite
> >assumption, and uses "#pragma external" to flag symbols that are known
> >to be external and should use the indirect sequence. All system header
> >files on HP-UX are decorated with these pragmas for all exported
> >variables.
> >
> >A similar technique could be used on most other platforms that today
> >require copy relocations.
> 
> Indeed, this is exactly what I did for alpha-elf, back in 1996.
> 
> It's a bit of a shame that we didn't do the same thing for one of the
> several reincarnations of ppc64(le)-elf, nor the initial aarch64.  Both have
> ISAs and ABIs that would not have suffered at all for having an indirect
> reference that relaxes to a direct reference iff the symbol turns out to be
> local.

Yeah.  The powerpc64 compiler generated GOT (TOC) makes this a bit
more difficult but GNU ld support for the ppc64 relaxation has been
there for quite a while.  We're missing support in gold (*).  I was
hoping to convert powerpc64 gcc away from using a TOC to the more
usual GOT relocs, where this sort of code editing becomes much easier.
Oh well, that never happened.

*) Over the last few days I've been cobbling together the gold
support.  Hopefully should be ready before 2.28 goes out.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM


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