Re: [PATCH v3 16/16] objtool,x86: Rewrite retpoline thunk calls

[Fāng-ruì Sòng]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2021 at 3:39 AM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 04:50:46PM -0700, Fangrui Song wrote:
> > On 2021-06-04, 'Nick Desaulniers' via Clang Built Linux wrote:
>
> > > is producing the linker error:
> > >
> > > ld.lld: error: drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/amdgpu.lto.o:
> > > SHT_SYMTAB_SHNDX has 79581 entries, but the symbol table associated
> > > has 79582
> > >
> > > Readelf having issues with the output:
> > > $ readelf -s amdgpu.lto.o.orig
> > > <works fine>
> > > $ readelf -s amdgpu.lto.o
> > > readelf: Error: Reading 73014451695 bytes extends past end of file for
> > > string table
> > > $ llvm-readelf -s amdgpu.lto.o
> > > llvm-readelf: error: 'amdgpu.lto.o': unable to continue dumping, the
> > > file is corrupt: section table goes past the end of file
> > >
>
> > tools/objtool/elf.c:elf_add_symbol may not update .symtab_shndx .
> > Speaking of llvm-objcopy, it finalizes the content of .symtab_shndx when .symtab
> > is finalized. objtool may want to adopt a similar approach.
> >
> > read_symbols searches for the section ".symtab_shndx". It'd be better to
> > use the section type SHT_SYMTAB_SHNDX.
>
> I think you've absolutely nailed it; but would you have more information
> or a code reference to what you're speaking about? My complete ELF
> and libelf knowledge is very limited and as demonstrated here, I'm not
> at all sure how all that extended index stuff is supposed to work.

The section index field of an Elf{32,64}_Sym (st_shndx) is 16-bit, so
it cannot represent a section index greater than 0xffff.
ELF actually reserves values in 0xff00~0xff00 for other purposes, so
st_shndx cannot represent a section whose index is greater or equal to
0xff00.
To overcome the 16-bit section index limitation, .symtab_shndx was designed.

http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch4.symtab.html says

> SHN_XINDEX
> This value is an escape value. It indicates that the symbol refers to a specific location within a section, but that the section header index for that section is too large to be represented directly in the symbol table entry. The actual section header index is found in the associated SHT_SYMTAB_SHNDX section. The entries in that section correspond one to one with the entries in the symbol table. Only those entries in SHT_SYMTAB_SHNDX that correspond to symbol table entries with SHN_XINDEX will hold valid section header indexes; all other entries will have value 0.

You may use https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/tools/llvm-objcopy/ELF/Object.cpp#L843
as a reference.