RFC: Turning executable stack warnings into errors
Nick Clifton
nickc@redhat.com
Wed Oct 18 10:44:49 GMT 2023
Hi Guys,
I am working on a patch to turn the linker's warning messages about
executable stacks into errors. My intent is to use this to force
programs that currently do have an executable stack to either change
or deliberately disable the errors from the linker. The plan is to
then use this feature to help improve the security of Fedora
binaries.
I realise that the --fatal-warnings option could basically do the same
thing, but that might be problematic for builds where some linker
warnings are inevitable and can be safely ignored. Hence I decided on
a new command line option instead.
The patch currently has these features:
* The change is configurable, but not on by default.
* There are new command line options to turn the future on and off as
well as an option to only generate warnings (or errors) if an object
file requests an executable stack, and not if one is requested via
the '-z execstack' command line option.
* A similar change is also made for the executable segments warning,
creating the ability to turn it into an error as well.
* Since linker errors cannot be ignored when running the linker
testsuite the patch also needs to enhance a fair number of tests so
that they do not fail if run with a linker configured to generate
errors by default.
Patch attached below. Any comments ?
Cheers
Nick
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