Re: [PATCH v3 17/21] vmcore: check NT_VMCORE_PAD as a mark indicating the end of ELF note buffer

HATAYAMA Daisuke
2013-03-21T02:59:30Z

From: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 17/21] vmcore: check NT_VMCORE_PAD as a mark indicating the end of ELF note buffer
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:11:51 -0700

> HATAYAMA Daisuke <d.hatayama@jp.fujitsu.com> writes:
>
>> Modern kernel marks the end of ELF note buffer with NT_VMCORE_PAD type
>> note in order to make the buffer satisfy mmap()'s page-size boundary
>> requirement. This patch makes finishing reading each buffer if the
>> note type now being read is NT_VMCORE_PAD type.
>
> Ick. Even with a pad header you can mark the end with an empty header,
> and my memory may be deceiving me but I believe an empty header is
> specified by the ELF ABI docs.
>
> Beyond which I don't quite see the point of any of this as all of these
> headers need to be combined into a single note section before being
> presented to user space.

Though this patch might get unecessary later, I cannot find part
explaining necessity of marking end of ELF segmetns with an empty
header in ELF spec. For example:

gabi
http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch5.pheader.html#note_section

AMD64
http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/abi.pdf

But still there's possibility of another particular spec that says
necessity of empty header.

Also, it's possible to get size of a whole part of ELF note segments
from p_memsz or p_filesz, and gdb and binutils are reading the note
segments until reaching the size.

Thanks.
HATAYAMA, Daisuke