RFC: Prevent disassembly beyond symbolic boundaries
Nicholas Clifton
nickc@redhat.com
Fri Jun 19 11:41:00 GMT 2015
Hi Tristan,
>> This will disassemble as:
>>
>> 0000000000000000 <foo>:
>> 0: 24 2f and $0x2f,%al
>> 2: 83 0f ba orl $0xffffffba,(%rdi)
>>
>> 0000000000000003 <bar>:
>> 3: 0f ba e2 03 bt $0x3,%edx
>>
>> Note how the instruction decoded at address 0x2 has stolen two bytes
>> from "foo", but these bytes are also decoded (correctly this time) as
>> part of the first instruction of foo.
> I am curious. Why do you think it was a problem ?
Strangely enough, this actually causes regressions with the perf tool's
testsuite:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054767
What happens is that perf test 21 runs objdump on a binary, *parses*
this output and compares that to the actual bytes in the binary.
Because of the overrun feature shown above you actually get more bytes
displayed in objdump's output than actually exist in the binary and so
the perf test fails.
> Even if there is a symbol in the middle of an instruction, Iâd like
> to understand what the processor will execute.
Except that even the current the displayed disassembly is not what the
processor would execute. In the example above the processor would
execute the ORL instruction starting at address 0x2. but it would not
continue on to execute the BT instruction at address 0x3. Instead it
would start decoding from address 0x5, whatever instruction that might be...
> Before the proposed
> change, it was possible, but after it isnât easy anymore.
True - but this only matters if the processor would execute from that
piece of memory. What if the byte(s) are actually data ? (eg a
constant pool). Then it would make more sense to display the bytes as
just byte values.
The point being that if there is a symbol that is in the middle of an
instruction then something hinky is going on. Either the symbol is
misplaced or the instruction is not really an instruction or else an
assembly programmer is being extra super clever and hiding data inside
instructions.
How about a tweak to the patch then ? What if the -D option
(disassemble all) disables this feature, and so the disassembled
instruction is displayed as before, whilst the -d option (disassemble
code) leaves it enabled. Then if you want to see bytes as instructions
you can use the -D option (possibly combined with -j), but if you want
to see a more likely, only real instructions disassembled version, then
use the -d option. (Obviously the patch would need to be extended with
an update to the documentation too).
Cheers
Nick
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