previously, builds for pre-armv6 targets hard-coded use of the "kuser
helper" system for atomics and thread-pointer access, resulting in
binaries that fail to run (crash) on systems where this functionality
has been disabled (as a security/hardening measure) in the kernel.
additionally, builds for armv6 hard-coded an outdated/deprecated
memory barrier instruction which may require emulation (extremely
slow) on future models.
this overhaul replaces the behavior for all pre-armv7 builds (both of
the above cases) to perform runtime detection of the appropriate
mechanisms for barrier, atomic compare-and-swap, and thread pointer
access. detection is based on information provided by the kernel in
auxv: presence of the HWCAP_TLS bit for AT_HWCAP and the architecture
version encoded in AT_PLATFORM. direct use of the instructions is
preferred when possible, since probing for the existence of the kuser
helper page would be difficult and would incur runtime cost.
for builds targeting armv7 or later, the runtime detection code is not
compiled at all, and much more efficient versions of the non-cas
atomic operations are provided by using ldrex/strex directly rather
than wrapping cas.
armv7/thumb2 provides a way to do atomics in thumb mode, but for armv6
we need a call to arm mode.
this commit is based on a patch by Stephen Thomas which fixed the
armv7 cases but not the armv6 ones.
all of this should be revisited if/when runtime selection of thread
pointer access and atomics are added.
this is perhaps not the optimal implementation; a_cas still compiles
to nested loops due to the different interface contracts of the kuser
helper cas function (whose contract this patch implements) and the
a_cas function (whose contract mimics the x86 cmpxchg). fixing this
may be possible, but it's more complicated and thus deferred until a
later time.
aside from improving performance and code size, this patch also
provides a means of producing binaries which can run on hardened
kernels where the kuser helpers have been disabled. however, at
present this requires producing binaries for armv6k or later, which
will not run on older cpus. a real solution to the problem of kernels
that omit the kuser helpers would be runtime detection, so that
universal binaries which run on all arm cpu models can also be
compatible with all kernel hardening profiles. robust detection
however is a much harder problem, and will be addressed at a later
time.
despite documentation that makes it sound a lot different, the only
ABI-constraint difference between TLS variants II and I seems to be
that variant II stores the initial TLS segment immediately below the
thread pointer (i.e. the thread pointer points to the end of it) and
variant I stores the initial TLS segment above the thread pointer,
requiring the thread descriptor to be stored below. the actual value
stored in the thread pointer register also tends to have per-arch
random offsets applied to it for silly micro-optimization purposes.
with these changes applied, TLS should be basically working on all
supported archs except microblaze. I'm still working on getting the
necessary information and a working toolchain that can build TLS
binaries for microblaze, but in theory, static-linked programs with
TLS and dynamic-linked programs where only the main executable uses
TLS should already work on microblaze.
alignment constraints have not yet been heavily tested, so it's
possible that this code does not always align TLS segments correctly
on archs that need TLS variant I.
actually this is just to avoid gcc being stupid and refusing to inline
the function version, even when the size cost is essentially identical
whether it's inlined or not.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
Rich Felker