Re: upgrade the orphan section warning to a hard link error

[Kees Cook]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 11:26:47AM -0700, Nathan Chancellor wrote:
> It might be interesting to turn orphan sections into an error if
> CONFIG_WERROR is set. Perhaps something like the following (FYI, not
> even compile tested)?
> 
> diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
> index 0837445110fc..485f47fc2c07 100644
> --- a/Makefile
> +++ b/Makefile
> @@ -1119,7 +1119,7 @@ endif
>  # We never want expected sections to be placed heuristically by the
>  # linker. All sections should be explicitly named in the linker script.
>  ifdef CONFIG_LD_ORPHAN_WARN
> -LDFLAGS_vmlinux += --orphan-handling=warn
> +LDFLAGS_vmlinux += --orphan-handling=$(if $(CONFIG_WERROR),error,warn)
>  endif

Yes, this is much preferred.

> Outright turning the warning into an error with no escape hatch might be
> too aggressive, as we have had these warnings triggered by new compiler
> generated sections, such as in commit 848378812e40 ("vmlinux.lds.h:
> Handle clang's module.{c,d}tor sections"). Unconditionally breaking the
> build in these situations is unfortunate but the warnings do need to be
> dealt with so I think having it error by default with the ability to
> opt-out is probably worth doing. I do not have a strong opinion though.

Correct; the mandate from Linus (disregarding his addition of
CONFIG_WERROR for all*config builds), is that we should avoid breaking
builds. It wrecks bisection, it causes problems across compiler versions,
etc.

So, yes, only on CONFIG_WERROR=y.

-- 
Kees Cook