these functions are part of the ARM EABI, meaning compilers may
generate references to them. known versions of gcc do not use them,
but llvm does. they are not provided by libgcc, and the de facto
standard seems to be that libc provides them.
calls to __aeabi_read_tp may be generated by the compiler to access
TLS on pre-v6 targets. previously, this function was hard-coded to
call the kuser helper, which would crash on kernels with kuser helper
removed.
to fix the problem most efficiently, the definition of __aeabi_read_tp
is moved so that it's an alias for the new __a_gettp. however, on v7+
targets, code to initialize the runtime choice of thread-pointer
loading code is not even compiled, meaning that defining
__aeabi_read_tp would have caused an immediate crash due to using the
default implementation of __a_gettp with a HCF instruction.
fortunately there is an elegant solution which reduces overall code
size: putting the native thread-pointer loading instruction in the
default code path for __a_gettp, so that separate default/native code
paths are not needed. this function should never be called before
__set_thread_area anyway, and if it is called early on pre-v6
hardware, the old behavior (crashing) is maintained.
ideally __aeabi_read_tp would not be called at all on v7+ targets
anyway -- in fact, prior to the overhaul, the same problem existed,
but it was never caught by users building for v7+ with kuser disabled.
however, it's possible for calls to __aeabi_read_tp to end up in a v7+
binary if some of the object files were built for pre-v7 targets, e.g.
in the case of static libraries that were built separately, so this
case needs to be handled.
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additionally, builds for armv6 hard-coded an outdated/deprecated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.
arm eabi requires this symbol for static C++ dtors.
usually it is provided by libstdc++, but when a C++ program
doesn't use the std lib (free-standing), the libc has to provide
it.
this was encountered while building transmission, which
depends on such a C++ library (libutp).
this function is nearly identical to __cxa_atexit, but it has the
order of argumens swapped for "performance reasons".
see page 25 of
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ihi0043d/IHI0043D_rtabi.pdf
there are other aeabi specific C++ support functions missing, but
it is not clear yet that GCC makes use of them so we omit them for
the moment.
Timo Teräs
Rich Felker
rofl0r