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SubjectRe: [crash, bisected] Re: [PATCH 3/4] x86_64: Fold pda into per cpu area
Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org> writes:
>
>
>> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>
>>> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>>
>>>>> The zero-based PDA mechanism requires the introduction of a new ELF segment
>>>>> based at vaddr 0 which is sufficiently unusual that it wouldn't surprise me
>>>>> if
>>>>> its triggering some toolchain bug.
>>>>>
>>>> Agreed. Given the previous description my hunch is that the bug is occurring
>>>> during objcopy. If vmlinux is good and the compressed kernel is bad.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Actually, it's not all that unusual... it's pretty common in various
>>> restricted environments. That being said, it's probably uncommon for *64-bit*
>>> code.
>>>
>> Well, it's also unusual because 1) it's vaddr 0, but paddr <high>, and 2) the
>> PHDRs are not sorted by vaddr order. 2) might actually be a bug.
>>
>
> I just looked and gcc does not use this technique for thread local data.
>

Which technique? It does assume you put the thread-local data near %gs
(%fs in userspace), and it uses a small offset (positive or negative) to
reach it.

At present, the x86-64 only uses %gs-relative addressing to reach the
pda, which are always small positive offsets. It always accesses
per-cpu data in a two-step process of getting the base of per-cpu data,
then offsetting to find the particular variable.

x86-32 has no pda, and arranges %fs so that %fs:variable gets the percpu
variant of variable. The offsets are always quite large.

> My initial concern about all of this was not making symbols section relative
> is relieved as this all appears to be a 64bit arch thing where that doesn't
> matter.
>

Why's that? I thought you cared particularly about making the x86-64
kernel relocatable for kdump, and that using non-absolute symbols was
part of that?

> Has anyone investigated using the technique gcc uses for thread local storage?
> http://people.redhat.com/drepper/tls.pdf
>

The powerpc guys tried using gcc-level thread-local storage, but it
doesn't work well. per-cpu data and per-thread data have different
constraints, and its hard to tell gcc about them. For example, if you
have a section of preemptable code in your function, it's hard to tell
gcc not to cache a "thread-local" variable across it, even though we
could have switched CPUs in the meantime.

> In particular using the local exec model so we can say:
> movq %fs:x@tpoff,%rax
>
> To load the contents of a per cpu variable x into %rax ?
>
> If we can use that model it should make it easier to interface with things like
> the stack protector code. Although we would still need to be very careful
> about thread switches.
>

You mean cpu switches? We don't really have a notion of thread-local
data in the kernel, other than things hanging off the kernel stack.

J


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