Re: [PATCH 0/2] x86/purgatory: Avoid kexec runtime warning with LLVM 18

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 at 17:44, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 4:15 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > How much of this silliness should we expect now for other parts of the kernel?
>
> Looks like ARCH=powerpc sets -mcmodel=large for modules and ARCH=um
> does for the whole kernel. So that LLVM change may have implications
> for those 2 other architectures.  Not sure we've had any bug reports
> or breakage in CI yet, like we have for x86+kexec.
>
> > Can we turn this off?
>
> Maybe we need to revisit
> commit e16c2983fba0 ("x86/purgatory: Change compiler flags from
> -mcmodel=kernel to -mcmodel=large to fix kexec relocation errors")
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=e16c2983fba0fa6763e43ad10916be35e3d8dc05
>
> at least the -mcmodel=kernel addition (since that patch added a few
> additional compiler flags that still LGTM).
>
..

> + Fangrui, Ard, who might know of alternative solutions to
> -mcmodel=large for e16c2983fba0.
>

I think it would be better to use -mcmodel=small -fpic. As Nick
explains, the large code model is really more suitable for executables
that span a large memory range. The issue with the purgatory seems to
be that it can be placed anywhere in memory, not that it is very big.

-mcmodel=small -fpic is what user space typically uses, so it is much
less likely to create problems.

Note that I have been looking into whether we can build the entire
kernel with -fpic (for various reasons). There are some issues to
resolve there, mostly related to per-CPU variables and the per-CPU
stack protector, but beyond that, things work happily and the number
of boot time relocations drops dramatically, due to the use of
RIP-relative references. So for the purgatory, I wouldn't expect too
many surprises.

> Otherwise, I think the dedicated linker script is the way to go. We
> really want tight control over what is or is not in the purgatory
> image.

Linker scripts are a bit tedious when it comes to maintenance,
especially with weird executables such as this one and needing to
support different linkers. So I'd prefer to avoid this.