Re: [PATCH v8 1/3] riscv: Introduce CONFIG_RELOCATABLE

[Alexandre Ghiti]

Hi Nick,

On 3/22/23 19:25, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 7:58 AM Björn Töpel <bjorn@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Alexandre Ghiti <alex@xxxxxxxx> writes:
> >
> > > +cc linux-kbuild, llvm, Nathan, Nick
> > >
> > > On 2/15/23 15:36, Alexandre Ghiti wrote:
> > > > From: Alexandre Ghiti <alex@xxxxxxxx>
> > > I tried a lot of things, but I struggle to understand, does anyone have
> > > any idea? FYI, the same problem happens with LLVM.
> Off the top of my head, no idea.
>
> (Maybe as a follow up to this series, I wonder if pursuing
> ARCH_HAS_RELR for ARCH=riscv is worthwhile?)


IIUC, the goal for using RELR is to reduce the size of a kernel image: 
right now, this is not my priority, but I'll add that to my todo list 
because that may be useful to distros.


> > Don't ask me *why*, but adding --emit-relocs to your linker flags solves
> > "the NULL .rela.dyn" both for GCC and LLVM.
> >
> > The downside is that you end up with a bunch of .rela cruft in your
> > vmlinux.
> There was a patch just this week to use $(OBJCOPY) to strip these from
> vmlinux (for x86). Looks like x86 uses --emit-relocs for KASLR:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230320121006.4863-1-petr.pavlu@xxxxxxxx/


That's nice, that would be an interesting intermediate step until we 
find the issue here as I believe it is important to have the relocations 
in the init section to save memory.

Thanks for your answer Nick, really appreciated,

Alex