[PATCH v7 7/9] ARM: add vdso user-space code

Russell King - ARM Linux linux at arm.linux.org.uk
Sat Jun 28 03:03:47 PDT 2014


On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 10:53:14AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 10:11:56PM -0500, Nathan Lynch wrote:
> > Place vdso-related user-space code in arch/arm/kernel/vdso/.
> > 
> > It is almost completely written in C with some assembly helpers to
> > load the data page address, sample the counter, and fall back to
> > system calls when necessary.
> > 
> > If CONFIG_ARM_ARCH_TIMER is not enabled, the vdso cannot service
> > high-resolution clocks and falls back to syscalls.  Low-resolution
> > clocks e.g. CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE can be serviced regardless.
> > 
> > Of particular note is that a post-processing step ("vdsomunge") is
> > necessary to produce a shared object which is architecturally allowed
> > to be used by both soft- and hard-float EABI programs.
> > 
> > The 2012 edition of the ARM ABI defines Tag_ABI_VFP_args = 3 "Code is
> > compatible with both the base and VFP variants; the user did not
> > permit non-variadic functions to pass FP parameters/results."
> > Unfortunately current toolchains do not support this tag, which is
> > ideally what we would use.
> > 
> > The best available option is to ensure that both EF_ARM_ABI_FLOAT_SOFT
> > and EF_ARM_ABI_FLOAT_HARD are unset in the ELF header's e_flags,
> > indicating that the shared object is "old" and should be accepted for
> > backward compatibility's sake.  While binutils < 2.24 appear to
> > produce a vdso.so with both flags clear, 2.24 always sets
> > EF_ARM_ABI_FLOAT_SOFT, with no way to inhibit this behavior.  So we
> > have to fix things up with a custom post-processing step.
> > 
> > In fact, the VDSO code in glibc does much less validation (including
> > checking these flags) than the code for handling conventional
> > file-backed shared libraries, so this is a bit moot unless glibc's
> > VDSO code becomes more strict.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Nathan Lynch <nathan_lynch at mentor.com>
> > ---
> >  arch/arm/kernel/asm-offsets.c        |   5 +
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/.gitignore      |   1 +
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/Makefile        |  59 +++++++
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/checkundef.sh   |   9 +
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/datapage.S      |  15 ++
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdso.S          |  35 ++++
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdso.lds.S      |  88 ++++++++++
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdsomunge.c     | 193 +++++++++++++++++++++
> >  arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vgettimeofday.c | 320 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> >  9 files changed, 725 insertions(+)
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/.gitignore
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/Makefile
> >  create mode 100755 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/checkundef.sh
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/datapage.S
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdso.S
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdso.lds.S
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vdsomunge.c
> >  create mode 100644 arch/arm/kernel/vdso/vgettimeofday.c
> 
> One change I would like to see (to stop the directory tree getting soo
> deep) is to move this to arch/arm/vdso - just like x86 is arch/x86/vdso.
> Was there a pressing reason to have it in arch/arm/kernel ?

It also looks like there's something missing for vdso_install to work.
arch/x86 has this:

PHONY += vdso_install
vdso_install:
        $(Q)$(MAKE) $(build)=arch/x86/vdso $@

but doesn't list it in the arch help.  I'm sure we can do better on ARM. :)

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