Thread (63 messages) 63 messages, 5 authors, 2020-08-21

Re: [PATCH v5 13/36] vmlinux.lds.h: add PGO and AutoFDO input sections

From: Arvind Sankar <hidden>
Date: 2020-08-01 03:51:34
Also in: linux-arch, linux-efi, lkml, stable

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 04:07:57PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
From: Nick Desaulniers <redacted>

Basically, consider .text.{hot|unlikely|unknown}.* part of .text, too.

When compiling with profiling information (collected via PGO
instrumentations or AutoFDO sampling), Clang will separate code into
.text.hot, .text.unlikely, or .text.unknown sections based on profiling
information. After D79600 (clang-11), these sections will have a
trailing `.` suffix, ie.  .text.hot., .text.unlikely., .text.unknown..

When using -ffunction-sections together with profiling infomation,
either explicitly (FGKASLR) or implicitly (LTO), code may be placed in
sections following the convention:
.text.hot.<foo>, .text.unlikely.<bar>, .text.unknown.<baz>
where <foo>, <bar>, and <baz> are functions.  (This produces one section
per function; we generally try to merge these all back via linker script
so that we don't have 50k sections).

For the above cases, we need to teach our linker scripts that such
sections might exist and that we'd explicitly like them grouped
together, otherwise we can wind up with code outside of the
_stext/_etext boundaries that might not be mapped properly for some
architectures, resulting in boot failures.

If the linker script is not told about possible input sections, then
where the section is placed as output is a heuristic-laiden mess that's
non-portable between linkers (ie. BFD and LLD), and has resulted in many
hard to debug bugs.  Kees Cook is working on cleaning this up by adding
--orphan-handling=warn linker flag used in ARCH=powerpc to additional
architectures. In the case of linker scripts, borrowing from the Zen of
Python: explicit is better than implicit.

Also, ld.bfd's internal linker script considers .text.hot AND
.text.hot.* to be part of .text, as well as .text.unlikely and
.text.unlikely.*. I didn't see support for .text.unknown.*, and didn't
see Clang producing such code in our kernel builds, but I see code in
LLVM that can produce such section names if profiling information is
missing. That may point to a larger issue with generating or collecting
profiles, but I would much rather be safe and explicit than have to
debug yet another issue related to orphan section placement.

Reported-by: Jian Cai <redacted>
Suggested-by: Fāng-ruì Sòng <redacted>
Tested-by: Luis Lozano <redacted>
Tested-by: Manoj Gupta <redacted>
Acked-by: Kees Cook <redacted>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Link: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commitdiff;h=add44f8d5c5c05e08b11e033127a744d61c26aee
Link: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commitdiff;h=1de778ed23ce7492c523d5850c6c6dbb34152655
Link: https://reviews.llvm.org/D79600
Link: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1084760
Debugged-by: Luis Lozano [off-list ref]
Signed-off-by: Nick Desaulniers <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <redacted>
---
 include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
index 2593957f6e8b..af5211ca857c 100644
--- a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
+++ b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
@@ -561,7 +561,10 @@
  */
 #define TEXT_TEXT							\
 		ALIGN_FUNCTION();					\
-		*(.text.hot TEXT_MAIN .text.fixup .text.unlikely)	\
+		*(.text.hot .text.hot.*)				\
+		*(TEXT_MAIN .text.fixup)				\
+		*(.text.unlikely .text.unlikely.*)			\
+		*(.text.unknown .text.unknown.*)			\
 		NOINSTR_TEXT						\
 		*(.text..refcount)					\
 		*(.ref.text)						\
-- 
2.25.1
This also changes the ordering to place all hot resp unlikely sections separate
from other text, while currently it places the hot/unlikely bits of each file
together with the rest of the code in that file. That seems like a reasonable
change and should be mentioned in the commit message.

However, the history of their being together comes from

  9bebe9e5b0f3 ("kbuild: Fix .text.unlikely placement")

which seems to indicate there was some problem with having them separated out,
although I don't quite understand what the issue was from the commit message.

Cc Andi and Michal to see if they remember.

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