[PATCH v2] ARM: module: fix unwind section relocation out of range error

[William Zhang]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 1:24 PM William Zhang
<william.zhang at broadcom.com> wrote:
>
> In an armv7 system that uses non-3G/1G split and with more than 512MB
> physical memory, driver load may fail with following error:
>    section 29 reloc 0 sym '': relocation 42 out of range (0xc2ab9be8 ->
> 0x7fad5998)
>
> This happens when relocation R_ARM_PREL31 from the unwind section
> .ARM.extab and .ARM.exidx are allocated from the VMALLOC space while
> .text section is from MODULES_VADDR space. It exceeds the +/-1GB
> relocation requirement of R_ARM_PREL31 hence triggers the error.
>
> The fix is to mark .ARM.extab and .ARM.exidx sections as executable so
> they can be allocated along with .text section and always meet range
> requirement.
>
> Fixes: ac3b43283923 ("module: replace module_layout with module_memory")
>
> Co-developed-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb at kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: William Zhang <william.zhang at broadcom.com>
>
> ---
>
> Changes in v2:
> - Fix the comment in code and commit message regarding the unwind
> section location
> - Add fix tag for more visibility
>
>  arch/arm/kernel/module-plts.c | 12 ++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/arch/arm/kernel/module-plts.c b/arch/arm/kernel/module-plts.c
> index 354ce16d83cb..b5338fe59706 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/kernel/module-plts.c
> +++ b/arch/arm/kernel/module-plts.c
> @@ -225,6 +225,18 @@ int module_frob_arch_sections(Elf_Ehdr *ehdr, Elf_Shdr *sechdrs,
>                         mod->arch.init.plt = s;
>                 else if (s->sh_type == SHT_SYMTAB)
>                         syms = (Elf32_Sym *)s->sh_addr;
> +#if defined(CONFIG_ARM_UNWIND) && !defined(CONFIG_VMSPLIT_3G)
> +               else if (s->sh_type == ELF_SECTION_UNWIND ||
> +                        (strncmp(".ARM.extab", secstrings + s->sh_name, 10) == 0)) {
> +                       /*
> +                        * To avoid the possible relocation out of range issue for
> +                        * R_ARM_PREL31, mark unwind section .ARM.extab and .ARM.exidx as
> +                        * executable so they will be allocated along with .text section to
> +                        * meet +/-1GB range requirement of the R_ARM_PREL31 relocation
> +                        */
> +                       s->sh_flags |= SHF_EXECINSTR;
> +               }
> +#endif
>         }
>
>         if (!mod->arch.core.plt || !mod->arch.init.plt) {
> --
> 2.43.7
>

Is this version okay to be accepted?
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