[LLVMdev] Handling ELF groups.

[Nick Kledzik]

On Dec 19, 2012, at 4:25 PM, Michael Spencer wrote:

> So I was looking into handling ELF groups today in the Atom model. It
> appears that we will need to add the concept of a group to the atom
> model directly, as modeling it with references fails to capture some
> semantics.
> 
> http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch4.sheader.html
> 
> Groups in ELF are collections of sections that must be either included
> or excluded as a unit.
I thought groups were a collection of symbol - not sections.  Is this a case 
where there is one symbol per section? 

> They also are used to implement COMDAT. Each
> group has an "identifying symbol entry" or "group signature". This is
> only used in the case of COMDAT groups (which are marked with a flag).
> When two COMDAT groups have the same group signature the linker must
> select one (not specified how to pick) and discard _all_ members of
> the other group.
> 
> Correctly implementing this requires knowing the group name for each
> group and having the resolver remove the correct set of atoms on
> collision. We also need to be able to explicitly track the identifying
> symbol entry for the relocatable case.

In the darwin linker this is solved using references.   The "signature" atom in 
a group has a "group-subordinate" reference to each atom in the group.
When an atom is coalesced away, its references are scanned and the
target of any group-subordinate reference is also coalesced.

Conceptually, a group is just a circle around some set of atoms.  That same
information can be represented as a connected graph.  That is, by introducing 
a zero size "master " atom with reference to each atom in the group.  In the special 
case of group comdat, the signature atom can be used as the master.

In other words, I'm not convinced of the need to introduce a new top level class
(Group) to go along with Atom and Reference.  I believe we can encode 
the same information using references.

-Nick

> 
> An idea for implementing this would be to add a list of Groups to each
> File. I don't believe a Group should be an atom as it has different
> semantics and would have to be treated specially everywhere.
> 
> A group would have a name, merge attribute, and a list of atoms it contains.
> 
> YAML mockup:
> 
> ---
> groups:
>  - name: _Z4funcIiET_S0_
>    merge: pickAny
>    members: [_Z4funcIiET_S0_, ".debug._Z4funcIiET_S0_"]
> 
> atoms:
>  - name _Z4funcIiET_S0_
>    scope: global
>    merge: asWeak
>    type: code
> ...
> 
> The main problem I see with this is that groups are no longer
> represented explicitly in the reference graph.
> 
> - Michael Spencer