Re: [RFC PATCH 4/7] kconfig: support new special property shell=

From: Kees Cook
Date: Sun Feb 11 2018 - 16:05:20 EST


On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 10:34 AM, Ulf Magnusson <ulfalizer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 6:56 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Old? That's not the case. The check for -fno-stack-protector will
>> likely be needed forever, as some distro compilers enable
>> stack-protector by default. So when someone wants to explicitly build
>> without stack-protector (or if the compiler's stack-protector is
>> detected as broken), we must force it off for the kernel build.
>
> What I meant is whether it makes sense to test if the
> -fno-stack-protector option is supported. Can we reasonably assume
> that passing -fno-stack-protector to the compiler won't cause an
> error?

That isn't something I've tested; but I can check if it's useful.

> Is it possible to build GCC with no "no stack protector" support? Do
> we need to support any compilers that would choke on the
> -fno-stack-protector flag itself?
>
> If we can reasonably assume that passing -fno-stack-protector is safe,
> then CC_HAS_STACKPROTECTOR_NONE isn't needed.

Well, there are two situations:

- does the user want to build _without_ stack protector? (which is
something some people want to do, no matter what I think of it)

- did _AUTO discover that stack protector output is broken?

In both cases, we need to pass -fno-stack-protector in case the distro
compiler was built with stack protector enabled by default.

-Kees

--
Kees Cook
Pixel Security