Re: [kernel-hardening] [PATCH v8 2/4] GCC plugin infrastructure

From: Andrew Donnellan
Date: Wed May 18 2016 - 04:54:15 EST


On 13/05/16 09:57, Emese Revfy wrote:
This patch allows to build the whole kernel with GCC plugins. It was ported from
grsecurity/PaX. The infrastructure supports building out-of-tree modules and
building in a separate directory. Cross-compilation is supported too.
Currently the x86, arm, arm64 and uml architectures enable plugins.

The directory of the gcc plugins is scripts/gcc-plugins. You can use a file or a directory
there. The plugins compile with these options:
* -fno-rtti: gcc is compiled with this option so the plugins must use it too
* -fno-exceptions: this is inherited from gcc too
* -fasynchronous-unwind-tables: this is inherited from gcc too
* -ggdb: it is useful for debugging a plugin (better backtrace on internal
errors)
* -Wno-narrowing: to suppress warnings from gcc headers (ipa-utils.h)
* -Wno-unused-variable: to suppress warnings from gcc headers (gcc_version
variable, plugin-version.h)

The infrastructure introduces a new Makefile target called gcc-plugins. It
supports all gcc versions from 4.5 to 6.0. The scripts/gcc-plugin.sh script
chooses the proper host compiler (gcc-4.7 can be built by either gcc or g++).
This script also checks the availability of the included headers in
scripts/gcc-plugins/gcc-common.h.

The gcc-common.h header contains frequently included headers for GCC plugins
and it has a compatibility layer for the supported gcc versions.

The gcc-generate-*-pass.h headers automatically generate the registration
structures for GIMPLE, SIMPLE_IPA, IPA and RTL passes.

Note that 'make clean' keeps the *.so files (only the distclean or mrproper
targets clean all) because they are needed for out-of-tree modules.

The arm and arm64 architectures were tested by David Brown <david.brown@xxxxxxxxxx>.

Signed-off-by: Emese Revfy <re.emese@xxxxxxxxx>

I've done some basic sanity testing on powerpc with the cyclomatic complexity plugin (with LE native + cross-compilers) and it seems to work with the patch below.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Donnellan <andrew.donnellan@xxxxxxxxxxx>

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/Kconfig b/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
index a18a0dc..0cfed5b 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
@@ -97,6 +97,7 @@ config PPC
select HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE_WITH_REGS if MPROFILE_KERNEL
select HAVE_FUNCTION_TRACER
select HAVE_FUNCTION_GRAPH_TRACER
+ select HAVE_GCC_PLUGINS
select SYSCTL_EXCEPTION_TRACE
select ARCH_WANT_OPTIONAL_GPIOLIB
select VIRT_TO_BUS if !PPC64

--
Andrew Donnellan OzLabs, ADL Canberra
andrew.donnellan@xxxxxxxxxxx IBM Australia Limited