previously, the call into stage 2 was made by looking up the symbol
name "__dls2" (which was chosen short to be easy to look up) from the
dynamic symbol table. this was no problem for the dynamic linker,
since it always exports all its symbols. in the case of the static pie
entry point, however, the dynamic symbol table does not contain the
necessary symbol unless -rdynamic/-E was used when linking. this
linking requirement is a major obstacle both to practical use of
static-pie as a nommu binary format (since it greatly enlarges the
file) and to upstream toolchain support for static-pie (adding -E to
default linking specs is not reasonable).
this patch replaces the runtime symbolic lookup with a link-time
lookup via an inline asm fragment, which reloc.h is responsible for
providing. in this initial commit, the asm is provided only for i386,
and the old lookup code is left in place as a fallback for archs that
have not yet transitioned.
modifying crt_arch.h to pass the stage-2 function pointer as an
argument was considered as an alternative, but such an approach would
not be compatible with fdpic, where it's impossible to compute
function pointers without already having performed relocations. it was
also deemed desirable to keep crt_arch.h as simple/minimal as
possible.
in principle, archs with pc-relative or got-relative addressing of
static variables could instead load the stage-2 function pointer from
a static volatile object. that does not work for fdpic, and is not
safe against reordering on mips-like archs that use got slots even for
static functions, but it's a valid on i386 and many others, and could
provide a reasonable default implementation in the future.
this move eliminates a duplicate "by-hand" symbol lookup loop from the
stage-1 code and replaces it with a call to find_sym, which can be
used once we're in stage 2. it reduces the size of the stage 1 code,
which is helpful because stage 1 will become the crt start file for
static-PIE executables, and it will allow stage 3 to access stage 2's
automatic storage, which will be important in an upcoming commit.
the outer-loop approach made sense when we were also processing
DT_JMPREL, which might be in REL or RELA form, to avoid major code
duplication. commit 09db855b35 removed
processing of DT_JMPREL, and in the remaining two tables, the format
(REL or RELA) is known by the name of the table. simply writing two
versions of the loop results in smaller and simpler code.
the DT_JMPREL relocation table necessarily consists entirely of
JMP_SLOT (REL_PLT in internal nomenclature) relocations, which are
symbolic; they cannot be resolved in stage 1, so there is no point in
processing them.
this overhaul further reduces the amount of arch-specific code needed
by the dynamic linker and removes a number of assumptions, including:
- that symbolic function references inside libc are bound at link time
via the linker option -Bsymbolic-functions.
- that libc functions used by the dynamic linker do not require
access to data symbols.
- that static/internal function calls and data accesses can be made
without performing any relocations, or that arch-specific startup
code handled any such relocations needed.
removing these assumptions paves the way for allowing libc.so itself
to be built with stack protector (among other things), and is achieved
by a three-stage bootstrap process:
1. relative relocations are processed with a flat function.
2. symbolic relocations are processed with no external calls/data.
3. main program and dependency libs are processed with a
fully-functional libc/ldso.
reduction in arch-specific code is achived through the following:
- crt_arch.h, used for generating crt1.o, now provides the entry point
for the dynamic linker too.
- asm is no longer responsible for skipping the beginning of argv[]
when ldso is invoked as a command.
- the functionality previously provided by __reloc_self for heavily
GOT-dependent RISC archs is now the arch-agnostic stage-1.
- arch-specific relocation type codes are mapped directly as macros
rather than via an inline translation function/switch statement.
Rich Felker