Re: [PATCH 3/9] efi/x86: Move efi stub globals from .bss to .data

[Arvind Sankar]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 06:03:38PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 17:16, Arvind Sankar <nivedita@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 10:20:42AM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > On Thu, 9 Apr 2020 at 23:08, Arvind Sankar <nivedita@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Apr 09, 2020 at 04:53:07PM -0400, Brian Gerst wrote:
> > > > > > Can we use the -fno-zero-initialized-in-bss compiler flag instead of
> > > > > > explicitly marking global variables?
> > > > >
> > > > > Scratch that.  Apparently it only works when a variable is explicitly
> > > > > initialized to zero.
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > > Brian Gerst
> > > >
> > > > Right, there doesn't seem to be a compiler option to turn off the use of
> > > > .bss altogether.
> > >
> > > Yeah. I'll try to come up with a way to consolidate this a bit across
> > > architectures (which is a bit easier now that all of the EFI stub C
> > > code lives in the same place). It is probably easiest to use a section
> > > renaming trick similar to the one I added for ARM (as Arvind suggested
> > > as well, IIRC), and get rid of the per-symbol annotations altogether.
> >
> > Does that work for 32-bit ARM, or does it need to be .data to tell the
> > compiler to avoid generating GOT references? If that's fine, we don't
> > actually need to rename sections -- linker script magic is enough. For
> > eg, the below pulls the EFI stub bss into .data for x86 without the need
> > for the annotations.
> >
> > diff --git a/arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.lds.S b/arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.lds.S
> > index 508cfa6828c5..e324819c95bc 100644
> > --- a/arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.lds.S
> > +++ b/arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.lds.S
> > @@ -52,6 +52,7 @@ SECTIONS
> >                 _data = . ;
> >                 *(.data)
> >                 *(.data.*)
> > +               drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/lib.a:(.bss .bss.*)
> >                 _edata = . ;
> >         }
> >         . = ALIGN(L1_CACHE_BYTES);
> 
> No, we can add this to ARM as well, and get rid of the
> __efistub_global annotations entirely.

Cool.

> 
> We'll still need .data.efistub for the .data pieces, but that is a
> separate issue.

You can avoid that by using an archive specification like above. i.e.
adding
	drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/lib.a:(.data .data.*)
to the .init.data output section will pull in just the .data input
sections from the EFI stub into the .init.data section.