[RFT/RFC PATCH 6/6] ARM: keep .text and .fixup regions together

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On 12 March 2015 at 22:10, Russell King - ARM Linux
<linux at arm.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 06:38:12PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> Fixup snippets are put into a dedicated section so that they don't
>> bloat cache lines with instructions that are usually not executed.
>> But there is no reason to put all these snippets together at the far
>> end of the .text output region, where the branch instruction they
>> contain could go out of range if the kernel grows in size.
>>
>> Instead, emit .text and .fixup regions together for each input object.
>> They should still be out of the way, but not so far that they go out
>> of range.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel at linaro.org>
>> ---
>>
>> Note that the TEXT_TEXT macro will emit *(.text) again but this should be
>> harmless.
>
> However, I wonder if by doing this, we're weakening the ability for
> kallsyms final link to succeed:
>
> /* .text section. Map to function alignment to avoid address changes
>  * during second ld run in second ld pass when generating System.map */
>
> Can we not just move .fixup before TEXT_TEXT?  The only thing between it
> and .text would be .text.hot.
>

Putting .fixup before .text already helps, but not enough for the
.config Arnd gave me that I have been testing this with.

What *(.text .fixup) does (i.e., putting both section names inside the
parentheses), is emitting both sections for each input object file, so
they will always be close to the object that it refers to, so it is
not the same thing.