Re: [PATCH 0/4] arm64/mm: contpte-sized exec folios for 16K and 64K pages

[WANG Rui]

Hi Ryan,

> I don't see how you can reliably influence this from the kernel? The ELF file
> alignment is, by default, 64K (16K on Android) and there is no guarrantee that
> the text section is the first section in the file. You need to align the start
> of the text section to the 2M boundary and to do that, you'll need to align the
> start of the file to some 64K boundary at a specific offset to the 2M boundary,
> based on the size of any sections before the text section. That's a job for the
> dynamic loader I think? Perhaps I've misunderstood what you're doing...

On Arch Linux for AArch64 and LoongArch64 I've observed that most
binaries place the executable segment in the first PT_LOAD. In that
case both the virtual address and file offset are 0, which happens to
satisfy the alignment requirements for PMD-sized or large folio
mappings.

x86 looks quite different. The executable segment is usually not the
first one.

After digging into this I realized this mostly comes from the linker
defaults. With GNU ld, -z noseparate-code merges the read-only and
read-only-executable segments into one, while -z separate-code
splits them, placing a non-executable read-only segment first. The
latter is the default on x86, partly to avoid making the ELF headers
executable when mappings start from the beginning of the file.

Other architectures tend to default to -z noseparate-code, which
makes it more likely that the text segment is the first PT_LOAD.

LLVM lld behaves differently again: --rosegment (equivalent to
-z separate-code) is enabled by default on all architectures, which
similarly tends to place the executable segment after an initial
read-only one. That default is clearly less friendly to large-page
text mappings.

Thanks,
Rui