Re: [PATCH v9 00/11] x86: PIE support to extend KASLR randomization

Peter Zijlstra
2019-08-06T15:51:33Z

On Tue, Aug 06, 2019 at 05:43:47PM +0200, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 12:12:44PM -0700, Thomas Garnier wrote:
> > These patches make some of the changes necessary to build the kernel as
> > Position Independent Executable (PIE) on x86_64. Another patchset will
> > add the PIE option and larger architecture changes.
>
> Yeah, about this: do we have a longer writeup about the actual benefits
> of all this and why we should take this all? After all, after looking
> at the first couple of asm patches, it is posing restrictions to how
> we deal with virtual addresses in asm (only RIP-relative addressing in
> 64-bit mode, MOVs with 64-bit immediates, etc, for example) and I'm
> willing to bet money that some future unrelated change will break PIE
> sooner or later.

Possibly objtool can help here; it should be possible to teach it about
these rules, and then it will yell when violated. That should avoid
regressions.