[PATCH v7 00/17] Add support for Clang LTO

Sami Tolvanen
2020-11-18T22:07:57Z

This patch series adds support for building the kernel with Clang's
Link Time Optimization (LTO). In addition to performance, the primary
motivation for LTO is to allow Clang's Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) to
be used in the kernel. Google has shipped millions of Pixel devices
running three major kernel versions with LTO+CFI since 2018.

Most of the patches are build system changes for handling LLVM bitcode,
which Clang produces with LTO instead of ELF object files, postponing
ELF processing until a later stage, and ensuring initcall ordering.

Note that v7 brings back arm64 support as Will has now staged the
prerequisite memory ordering patches [1], and drops x86_64 while we work
on fixing the remaining objtool warnings [2].

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arm64/linux.git/log/?h=for-next/lto
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201114004911.aip52eimk6c2uxd4@treble/

You can also pull this series from

https://github.com/samitolvanen/linux.git lto-v7

---
Changes in v7:

- Rebased to master again.

- Added back arm64 patches as the prerequisites are now staged,
and dropped x86_64 support until the remaining objtool issues
are resolved.

- Dropped ifdefs from module.lds.S.

Changes in v6:

- Added the missing --mcount flag to patch 5.

- Dropped the arm64 patches from this series and will repost them
later.

Changes in v5:

- Rebased on top of tip/master.

- Changed the command line for objtool to use --vmlinux --duplicate
to disable warnings about retpoline thunks and to fix .orc_unwind
generation for vmlinux.o.

- Added --noinstr flag to objtool, so we can use --vmlinux without
also enabling noinstr validation.

- Disabled objtool's unreachable instruction warnings with LTO to
disable false positives for the int3 padding in vmlinux.o.

- Added ANNOTATE_RETPOLINE_SAFE annotations to the indirect jumps
in x86 assembly code to fix objtool warnings with retpoline.

- Fixed modpost warnings about missing version information with
CONFIG_MODVERSIONS.

- Included Makefile.lib into Makefile.modpost for ld_flags. Thanks
to Sedat for pointing this out.

- Updated the help text for ThinLTO to better explain the trade-offs.

- Updated commit messages with better explanations.

Changes in v4:

- Fixed a typo in Makefile.lib to correctly pass --no-fp to objtool.

- Moved ftrace configs related to generating __mcount_loc to Kconfig,
so they are available also in Makefile.modfinal.

- Dropped two prerequisite patches that were merged to Linus' tree.

Changes in v3:

- Added a separate patch to remove the unused DISABLE_LTO treewide,
as filtering out CC_FLAGS_LTO instead is preferred.

- Updated the Kconfig help to explain why LTO is behind a choice
and disabled by default.

- Dropped CC_FLAGS_LTO_CLANG, compiler-specific LTO flags are now
appended directly to CC_FLAGS_LTO.

- Updated $(AR) flags as KBUILD_ARFLAGS was removed earlier.

- Fixed ThinLTO cache handling for external module builds.

- Rebased on top of Masahiro's patch for preprocessing modules.lds,
and moved the contents of module-lto.lds to modules.lds.S.

- Moved objtool_args to Makefile.lib to avoid duplication of the
command line parameters in Makefile.modfinal.

- Clarified in the commit message for the initcall ordering patch
that the initcall order remains the same as without LTO.

- Changed link-vmlinux.sh to use jobserver-exec to control the
number of jobs started by generate_initcall_ordering.pl.

- Dropped the x86/relocs patch to whitelist L4_PAGE_OFFSET as it's
no longer needed with ToT kernel.

- Disabled LTO for arch/x86/power/cpu.c to work around a Clang bug
with stack protector attributes.

Changes in v2:

- Fixed -Wmissing-prototypes warnings with W=1.

- Dropped cc-option from -fsplit-lto-unit and added .thinlto-cache
scrubbing to make distclean.

- Added a comment about Clang >=11 being required.

- Added a patch to disable LTO for the arm64 KVM nVHE code.

- Disabled objtool's noinstr validation with LTO unless enabled.

- Included Peter's proposed objtool mcount patch in the series
and replaced recordmcount with the objtool pass to avoid
whitelisting relocations that are not calls.

- Updated several commit messages with better explanations.

Sami Tolvanen (17):
tracing: move function tracer options to Kconfig
kbuild: add support for Clang LTO
kbuild: lto: fix module versioning
kbuild: lto: limit inlining
kbuild: lto: merge module sections
kbuild: lto: remove duplicate dependencies from .mod files
init: lto: ensure initcall ordering
init: lto: fix PREL32 relocations
PCI: Fix PREL32 relocations for LTO
modpost: lto: strip .lto from module names
scripts/mod: disable LTO for empty.c
efi/libstub: disable LTO
drivers/misc/lkdtm: disable LTO for rodata.o
arm64: vdso: disable LTO
KVM: arm64: disable LTO for the nVHE directory
arm64: disable recordmcount with DYNAMIC_FTRACE_WITH_REGS
arm64: allow LTO_CLANG and THINLTO to be selected

.gitignore | 1 +
Makefile | 45 +++--
arch/Kconfig | 74 +++++++
arch/arm64/Kconfig | 4 +
arch/arm64/kernel/vdso/Makefile | 3 +-
arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/nvhe/Makefile | 4 +-
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile | 2 +
drivers/misc/lkdtm/Makefile | 1 +
include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h | 11 +-
include/linux/init.h | 79 +++++++-
include/linux/pci.h | 19 +-
kernel/trace/Kconfig | 16 ++
scripts/Makefile.build | 50 ++++-
scripts/Makefile.lib | 6 +-
scripts/Makefile.modfinal | 9 +-
scripts/Makefile.modpost | 25 ++-
scripts/generate_initcall_order.pl | 270 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
scripts/link-vmlinux.sh | 70 ++++++-
scripts/mod/Makefile | 1 +
scripts/mod/modpost.c | 16 +-
scripts/mod/modpost.h | 9 +
scripts/mod/sumversion.c | 6 +-
scripts/module.lds.S | 24 +++
23 files changed, 677 insertions(+), 68 deletions(-)
create mode 100755 scripts/generate_initcall_order.pl

base-commit: 0fa8ee0d9ab95c9350b8b84574824d9a384a9f7d
--
2.29.2.299.gdc1121823c-goog