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SubjectRe: why the decompressed procedure move kernel from address 0x100000(1M) to 0x1000000(16M) +x
On 06/03/2012 01:41 AM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Time wise copying the kernel probably takes a millisecond or less on
> modern hardware, so I don't think it is a particularly large concern.
>

If your boot time budget is a second, getting rid of a millisecond helps.

> Looking at parse_elf I see two misfeatures.
> - parse_elf is short some memsets for the ELF sections that are larger
> in memory than they are in the file data.
> - We don't return the entry point of the elf header and instead hard
> code the beginning of the file data.
>
> The oddest thing about parse_elf is what makes the copies parse_elf
> performs safe. It just happens to be the case that because of the
> way ld lays out the file those copies turn into a single memmove
> that just strips off the elf header and program header.
>
> So it should be trivial to and perhaps even safer to decompress the
> program segments to their final destination.
>
> Looking at the way the code is evolving, I suspect we should just give
> up overlapping compressed data and uncompressed data. The elf header
> logic in theory allows the code in a more arbitrary order, and it
> doesn't look like anyone has done a worst case space analysis for
> anything except gzip. The code works most of the time today but
> I do wonder if it is safe.
>
> Additionally at the rate we are adding compression algorithms I don't
> believe that all of the compression alorigthms use the gzip footer that
> reports the uncompressed length of the file. So I suspect it would be
> wise to get z_output_len from simply examining the uncompressed file
> that we feed to compression programs, aka vmlinux.bin.all-y
>
> Perhaps I am wrong but I have the strongest feeling we are playing with
> fire and getting very lucky right now.

I think it might be even worse; on x86-64 we produce 2 MiB of completely
useless zero-padding after the header. I have wanted to get rid of it
but I'm not sure if the ELF code is robust enough. The code is a
hackwork and yes, should be replaced by decompressing into the
designated target areas.

-hpa

--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.



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