First: Woo Hoo! Thanks for looking in to this problem Egor!!
egor duda wrote:
Clean way to handle such situations (other than convincing
Microsoft to change a loader) is to add some runtime support for
non-zero-offset imports.
The idea is to add a vector of "cygwin internal pseudo-relocation"
entries to executable data section and to perform relocations of
appropriate data manually at program startup.
But why is this cygwin-specific? It seems that it's equally
applicable to mingw (e.g. native) DLLs, just as mingw's gcc can use
the current auto-import feature, even though MSVC can't understand or
use it...
Attached is a proof-of-concept patch to ld and simple testcase.
Tested, and works:
$ ./crtest
ptr=1125, addend=8
reloc target=401125
ptr=112b, addend=4
reloc target=40112b
data=111 222 333
If this idea is worthwhile, i think i should add more things to the
patch:
Absolutely. Of course, it would still need to be *rigorously* tested
to insure that
a) DLLs built this way could still be linked-to by "regular" code
that doesn't violate the current limitations. (e.g. suppose I as the
cygintl-2.dll maintainer built the next cygintl-2.dll using this
spiffy new ld.exe; so now, cygintl-2.dll has the extra reloc table.
Q1: will existing code that relied on the OLD cygintl-2.dll (without
the additional reloc table) and does NOT try to access
data-with-addend, STILL work if I drop in the new DLL? [e.g. runtime
backwards compat]
Q2: Could I relink old code (that again, does NOT try to access
data-with-addend) to the new DLL using an OLD ld.exe? (e.g. an
enduser of cygintl-2.dll who hasn't updated their binutils) [e.g
linktime backwards compat]
Q3: Is the new DLL usable by windows tools, provided a suitable import
library is generated? (I'm thinking here of mingw folks who build DLLs
and implibs for use by others with MSVC -- granted, MSVC can't use
auto-import at all, much less your extention. But the same linker
will be used even to build "regular" DLLs...we can't break that.)
1. Make cygreloc generation conditional via --enable-cygwin-reloc or
something like that.
At first, yes, it does need to be conditional -- and default to OFF,
probably...
And, it should probably not be "cygwin" specific. --enable-data-reloc?
2. If linker creates at least one cygreloc entry, it should emit
reference to some external symbol, say 'cygwin_process_cygreloc' so
that if object contains non-empty cygreloc vector it'd be
guaranteed that it can't be linked with runtime without cygreloc
support.
Okay, that takes care of "new style" exe accidentally linking at
runtime to "old style" DLL. Still, that leaves compatibility
questions about
existing "old style" EXE ---> "new style" DLL
linking a "new" old style EXE using the old linker ---> against a
"new style" DLL
This chunk of code (in pe-dll.c)
+ if (pe_dll_extra_pe_debug)
+ printf ("creating cygreloc entry for %s (addend=%d)\n",
+ fixup_name, addend);
+ b = make_cygreloc_fixup_entry (name, fixup_name, addend,
output_bfd);
+ add_bfd_to_link (b, b->filename, &link_info);
doesn't seem to get called in your example -- but it should, if I
understand correctly...What's the deal?
Anyway, because I can't see any "creating cygreloc entry..." debug
messages, I'm not quite sure exactly where the cygreloc vector GOES --
into the client .o, or into the DLL. I had assumed the DLL, but your
point #2 above confuses that issue for me...
(cygreloc --> addend_reloc?)
3. Make relocations a bit more flexible by adding type and size
(possible 64-bit support?)
I dunno -- that's a tall order. This addend-offset problem affects
structs and arrays -- which come in all SORTS of specific types with
different field orders and sizes. Also, what about recursive offsets?
bob = a[2].foo.bar[3].baz ?
Granted, fixing 64 bit types (long long), simple arrays, and simple
structs will go a LONG way to solving the problem in practical terms
-- but until EVERY case is covered, we still need to detect the
failure cases and warn at link time (not runtime).
Comments?
Nice work so far, but it'll need LOTS of testing and verification, as
you can well imagine. Unfortunately, my time will be VERY VERY
limited over the next six weeks to help with this sort of thing -- or
for any cygwin-related stuff. Thesis Defense approaches...
--Chuck