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

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 at 17:59, Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Replacing -mcmodel=large in PURGATORY_CFLAGS with

--mcmodel=small -fpic -fvisibility=hidden

seems to do the trick for me.