Re: [PATCH v2] arm: detect buggy binutils when in thumb2 mode
From: Martin Storsjö
Date: Thu Nov 23 2017 - 07:59:04 EST
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
On older versions of binutils, \sym points to an aligned address. On
newer versions of binutils, \sym sometimes points to the unaligned thumb
address in certain circumstances. In order to homogenize this behavior,
rather than adding 1, we could simply OR in 1, so that already unaligned
instructions don't change. While that works, the downside is that we have
to add an `orr` instruction to a fast path. The assembler can't do this at
assemble time via "|1" because "invalid operands (.text and *ABS* sections)
for `|'". A better solution would be to have consistent binutils behavior,
but that ship has sailed.
So, this commit adds a detection mechanism, which began as a small thing
from Russell King that I then rewrote to use pure bash instead of
shelling out, so that it doesn't slow down the build process. The detection
mechanism _could_ be used to modify the assembly we generate, but for now
it's just being used to catch buggy binutils and abort the build process in
that case.
The rest of this commit message contains all of the relevant information
about the boot bug when compiled in thumb2 mode.
My tests concerned these versions:
broken: GNU ld (Gentoo 2.29.1 p3) 2.29.1
working: GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.26.1
FWIW, this issue stems from this change:
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21458
The same issue caused problems in libavcodec as well, where we chose to
work around the issue in this fashion:
https://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=commitdiff;h=9dde6ab06c48f9447cd16f39bee33569cddb7be4;hp=547db1eaecd597031165a2bf637acaaacde52788
Related debian bug report, with a different workaround:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870622
(In libav, we chose the workaround since the .eqv one suggested in the
debian bug report didn't really work well with assemblers for other
platforms.)
// Martin