Regression for OCaml introduced by rebase 4.4.4

David Allsopp David.Allsopp@cl.cam.ac.uk
Thu Feb 15 11:44:00 GMT 2018


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Feb  9 13:12, David Allsopp wrote:
> > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > On Feb  9 11:29, David Allsopp wrote:
> > > > [...]
> > > > When this was originally encountered for 64-bit MSVC (this was all

<snip>

> > > I'm curious why this isn't done yet.
> >
> > I'm hoping that doing it is going to reveal that it simply wasn't
> > considered in 2008, rather than that it was and there was an issue
> > with it (I think it will just be that it wasn't thought of - like
> > Cygwin at that time in 2008, our x86_64 on Windows support was
> > extremely limited and not receiving much engineering focus).
> 
> We had similar problems back then.  The idea to move the executable and
> DLLs beyond the lower 32 bit area was nice as such... only GCC didn't
> support it at the time at all.  We had to add the x86-64 medium and
> large cmodel implementation to GCC to make this work first.
> Cygwin executables are compiled with --mcmodel=medium, IIRC.

This all seems to be working nicely, though the mcmodel stuff may also be part of why this wasn't fixed properly in 2008, which is because of data symbols. Everything does seem to be working correctly (there are various int symbols in the ocaml runtime which are always requiring absolute relocations, not relative ones, from the DLLs), but I'm trying to get my head around being certain that that should always be the case.

gcc -Q --help=target seems to show that the default for mcmodel is "32", but I'm struggling to find a description of precisely what that means? If I compile all the units with -mcmodel=small then, as expected, gcc starts generating RELOC_REL32 for data symbols as well. flexdll then starts creating thunks for data symbols, though the Cygwin runtime unsurprisingly blows up before there's time for flexdll's sins to become apparent!

Is it the case with -mcmodel=medium that an external data symbol could never be referred to via a RELOC_REL32? My reading of it was that that would only be the case if  the symbol itself refers to data which is large (-mlarge-data-threshold), but it seems to be happening for ints, which are clearly "small". Or have I still not properly understood x64 code models? The remaining question is what the difference between -mcmodel=32 and -mcmodel=medium really is?


David

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