On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 5:41 PM Ard Biesheuvel [off-list ref] wrote:

Like arm64, ARM supports position independent code sequences that
produce symbol references with a greater reach than the ordinary
adr/ldr instructions. Since on ARM, the adrl pseudo-instruction is
only supported in ARM mode (and not at all when using Clang), having
a adr_l macro like we do on arm64 is useful, and increases symmetry
as well.

Currently, we use open coded instruction sequences involving literals
and arithmetic operations. Instead, we can use movw/movt pairs on v7
CPUs, circumventing the D-cache entirely.

E.g., on v7+ CPUs, we can emit a PC-relative reference as follows:

       movw         <reg>, #:lower16:<sym> - (1f + 8)
       movt         <reg>, #:upper16:<sym> - (1f + 8)
  1:   add          <reg>, <reg>, pc

For older CPUs, we can emit the literal into a subsection, allowing it
to be emitted out of line while retaining the ability to perform
arithmetic on label offsets.

E.g., on pre-v7 CPUs, we can emit a PC-relative reference as follows:

       ldr          <reg>, 2f
  1:   add          <reg>, <reg>, pc
       .subsection  1
  2:   .long        <sym> - (1b + 8)
       .previous

This is allowed by the assembler because, unlike ordinary sections,
subsections are combined into a single section in the object file, and
so the label references are not true cross-section references that are
visible as relocations. (Subsections have been available in binutils
since 2004 at least, so they should not cause any issues with older
toolchains.)

So use the above to implement the macros mov_l, adr_l, ldr_l and str_l,
all of which will use movw/movt pairs on v7 and later CPUs, and use
PC-relative literals otherwise.

Reviewed-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>

That is obviously a very neat tool you have there.
I worry a bit that people reading the code might have to
issue git log/blame on it to get the commit message in
order to understand what is going on.
Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij <redacted>

Yours,
Linus Walleij

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