Re: Bug#217484: Bug#204789: gcl segfault on ia64
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 11:49:38AM -0500, Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings, and thank you so much for your reply on this issue!
>
> Please let me preface the below with the statement that these are, of
> course, my opinions only, and that there may well be issues of which
> I'm unaware which may contraindicate my conclusions.
>
> Briefly, I think this is a bug in libc6 because:
>
> 1) It makes stable unexeced binary images, to my understanding,
> impossible.
Unexecing has never, however, worked portably. I think emacs even
moved away from it, though I'm not sure of that.
> base, I cannot find it. I've had a helpful suggestion from a
> reader of debian-ia64 that I should modify the gcl's unexec to dump
> the portion of the descriptor table containing internal function
> addresses into the image itself as a runtime override of ld.so's
> work, but this appears both desperate and fragile.
The alternatives are also desperate and fragile. That at least limits
the damage to gcl.
> 2) ld.so's changing of the function descriptor table is (apparently)
> unnecessary, albeit possibly permitted by the ABI. To my
> knowledge, the Debian port to hppa faced similar issues, yet the
> implementation arrived at is free of this problem. In addition,
> the same helpful respondent referred to above suggested three ways
> in which this problem could be addressed at the ld.so level:
The way that hppa does this is, I think, very different. Two of the
suggestions below require substantial changes to the static linker and
some fudging with the ABI. Using sbrk would probably not solve the
issue at all.
> 3) The ld.so ia64-specific behavior is clearly the root of the tree of
> these problems, and is the logical place to address them all once
> and for all. And, unless the ABI mandates that the descriptors
> *must* change across runs, implementing the descriptor table
> creation in a manner consistent with function addressing use on all
> the other Debian platforms is bound to improve the consistency,
> continuity, and robustness of the distro as a whole. To be more
> precise, the alternative to an ld.so fix is for every program from
> now on which ever uses unexec to put in and maintain lengthy ia64
> specific #ifdef'ed modifications.
>
> Anyway, these are just my thoughts.
There is a flaw in your logic. It's not "the ABI mandates that the
descriptors *must* change across runs" so much as "the ABI offers no
opportunity to *ensure* that descriptors do not change across runs".
If anything this is a problem with the ia64 linux ABI; take it up with
them. It can not be solved contained in glibc.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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