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Re: New .nops directive, to aid Linux alternatives patching?


On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 10:58 AM, Andrew Cooper
<andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/2018 17:19, H.J. Lu wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:45 AM, H.J. Lu <hjl.tools@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:25 AM, Andrew Cooper
>>> <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
>>>> On 11/02/2018 00:59, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>>>>>> Please try users/hjl/nop branch:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://github.com/hjl-tools/binutils-gdb/tree/users/hjl/nop
>>>>>> Oh - thankyou!  I was about to ask if there were any pointers to get
>>>>>> started hacking on binutils.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As for the functionality, there are unfortunately some issues.  Given
>>>>>> this source:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>         .text
>>>>>> single:
>>>>>>         nop
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pseudo_1:
>>>>>>         .nop 1
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pseudo_8:
>>>>>>         .nop 8
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pseudo_8_4:
>>>>>>         .nop 8, 4
>>>>>>
>>>>>> pseudo_20:
>>>>>>         .nop 20
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I get the following disassembly:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 0000000000000000 <single>:
>>>>>>    0:    90                       nop
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 0000000000000001 <pseudo_1>:
>>>>>>    1:    66 90                    xchg   %ax,%ax
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 0000000000000003 <pseudo_8>:
>>>>>>    3:    66 0f 1f 84 00 00 00     nopw   0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
>>>>>>    a:    00 00
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 000000000000000c <pseudo_8_4>:
>>>>>>    c:    90                       nop
>>>>>>    d:    0f 1f 40 00              nopl   0x0(%rax)
>>>>>>   11:    0f 1f 40 00              nopl   0x0(%rax)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 0000000000000015 <pseudo_20>:
>>>>>>   15:    90                       nop
>>>>>>   16:    66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00     nopw   %cs:0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
>>>>>>   1d:    00 00 00
>>>>>>   20:    66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00     nopw   %cs:0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
>>>>>>   27:    00 00 00
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The MAX_NOP part looks to be working as intended (including reducing
>>>>>> below the default of 10), but there appears to be an off-by-one
>>>>>> somewhere, as one too many nops are emitted in the block.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Furthermore, attempting to use .nop 30 yields:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /tmp/ccI2Eakp.s: Assembler messages:
>>>>>> /tmp/ccI2Eakp.s: Fatal error: can't write 145268933551616 bytes to
>>>>>> section .text of nops.o: 'Bad value'
>>>>> Please try my branch again.  It should be fixed.
>>>> Thanks.  All of that looks to be in order.
>>>>
>>>> However, when trying to build larger examples, I've started hitting:
>>>>
>>>> /tmp/ccvxOy2v.s: Assembler messages:
>>>> /tmp/ccvxOy2v.s: Internal error in md_convert_frag at
>>>> ../../gas/config/tc-i386.c:9510.
>>>>
>>>> Which is the gas_assert (fragP->fr_var != BFD_RELOC_X86_NOP); you've added.
>>>>
>>>> It occurs when the calculation of the number of nops to insert evaluates
>>>> to 0, and a simple ".nop 0" managed to reproduce the issue.  The
>>>> calculation evaluating to 0 is a side effect of the existing logic to
>>>> evaluate how much, if an, padding is required, and follows this kind of
>>>> pattern:
>>>>
>>> It should be fixed now.  I also added 11-byte nop for 64-bit:
>>>
>>> 67 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 00 nopw %cs:0x0(%eax,%eax,1)
>>>
>> I implemented:
>>
>> .nop SIZE [, MAX_NOP]
>>
>> where the maximum size is 255 bytes.  Should we go with
>>
>> .nop MAX_SIZE, SIZE [, MAX_NOP]
>>
>> to support more than 255 bytes?
>
> If you were to do that, why not simply remove the 255 maximum limit,
> rather than having a user pass two identical numbers?  That said, I

Not two identical numbers.  You can have

.nop 512, 30
.nop 512, expression

> think the current implementation with 255 is probably fine; My example
> of ~45 is pushing it, but I expect that any example trying to use 64 or
> more almost certainly has a better way to do the same thing.
>

I used a machine dependent extension in assembler to implement
this so that I only need to change the x86 specific part of assembler.
To do this, I need to know the maximum size of nop directive when
parsing nop directive.  I will update the size limit to 512 bytes.

H.J.


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