[LLVMdev] [lld] Handling non SHF_ALLOC sections.

[Michael Spencer]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Shankar Easwaran
<shankare at codeaurora.org>wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
>
> On 9/16/2013 7:23 PM, Michael Spencer wrote:
>
>> Debug info linking is currently broken due to how we handle reading and
>> laying out non SHF_ALLOC sections. I posted a patch that partially fixes
>> this, but it's both the wrong approach and doesn't handle multiple input
>> files with debug info (wrong relocation values).
>>
>> The first issue is representing non SHF_ALLOC atoms in the Atom model. We
>> currently don't have a type for this, and DefinedAtom.cpp makes
>> assumptions
>> about the permissions of an Atom based on their type, so it's hard to use
>> an existing type.
>>
> Can we parse the Debug sections into atoms too ? This way we could
> associate Debug information associated with DefinedAtoms (seperate
> reference types, probably).
>
> The advantage of this approach would be that Garbage collection would
> remove all the unneeded references automatically when the definedatom is
> removed.
>
> I think Nick also mentioned about a similiar way a while back.


You can't just parse it by byte ranges and pull some out. You would
actually need to parse the DWARF and rewrite it.


>
>
>  The next problem is in the ELF writer. It currently cannot handle
>> AtomSections that are not in a segment as file offsets and addresses are
>> never set. This means that assignOffsets is not called, and that the atoms
>> within are never added to the _atomToAddressMap. However, we can't just
>> add
>> them to that map with their virtual address, as they don't have a virtual
>> address. We need to use the symbol value, which is the offset into the
>> section. My current hack to fix this is to call
>> assignVirtualAddresses(-**fileoffset) and then explicitly added them to
>> the
>> _atomToAddressMap.
>>
>> Any ideas for the proper fix here?
>>
> There is a way that we can handle this without lot of tweaks.
>
> a) Assign the debug sections part of a linker internal segment(the segment
> would not appear in the output file), hasOutputSegment will return true for
> a debug section.
>
> b) Around lines 623, in DefaultLayout, we find out if the section is
> associated with the special debug section, we add this sepecial segment to
> the list of segments
>

The problem with this is that it's not just debug. We need to properly
implement ELF semantics (ok, really gnu-ld semantics and the ELF spec
doesn't say what should happen here (or anywhere really)). The semantics
seem to be that the value of symbols in non SHF_ALLOC sections is their
offset within the section.


>
> c) Around lines 731 in DefaultLayout.h, we compare the segment type
> against the linker internal segment types, and assign offsets for the debug
> section. Lets not set the virtual addresses for these sections. If there is
> a need for assigning virtual addresses, you could change the second loop
> that assigns virtual addresses to deal with that too.
>
> Thanks
>
> Shankar Easwaran
>
> --
> Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code Aurora Forum, hosted
> by the Linux Foundation
>
>
- Michael Spencer
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