Re: [RFC V2 00/16] objtool: Add support for Arm64

[Raphael Gault]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for offering your help and sorry for the late answer.

My understanding is that a table of offsets is built by GCC, those
offsets being scaled by 4 before adding them to the base label.
I believe the offsets are stored in the .rodata section. To find the
size of that table, it is needed to find a comparison, which can be
optimized out apprently. In that case the end of the array can be found
by locating labels pointing to data behind it (which is not 100% safe).

On 5/16/19 3:29 PM, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 11:36:39AM +0100, Raphael Gault wrote:
>> Noteworthy points:
>> * I still haven't figured out how to detect switch-tables on arm64. I
>> have a better understanding of them but still haven't implemented checks
>> as it doesn't look trivial at all.
>
> Switch tables were tricky to get right on x86.  If you share an example
> (or even just a .o file) I can take a look.  Hopefully they're somewhat
> similar to x86 switch tables.  Otherwise we may want to consider a
> different approach (for example maybe a GCC plugin could help annotate
> them).
>

The case which made me realize the issue is the one of
arch/arm64/kernel/module.o:apply_relocate_add:

```
What seems to happen in the case of module.o is:
  334:   90000015        adrp    x21, 0 <do_reloc>
which retrieves the location of an offset in the rodata section, and a
bit later we do some extra computation with it in order to compute the
jump destination:
  3e0:   78625aa0        ldrh    w0, [x21, w2, uxtw #1]
  3e4:   10000061        adr     x1, 3f0 <apply_relocate_add+0xf8>
  3e8:   8b20a820        add     x0, x1, w0, sxth #2
  3ec:   d61f0000        br      x0
```

Please keep in mind that the actual offsets might vary.

I'm happy to provide more details about what I have identified if you
want me to.

Thanks,

--
Raphael Gault
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