Re: [RFC PATCH 06/11] x86: make sure _etext includes function sections

Josh Poimboeuf
2020-02-21T19:50:55Z

On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 11:36:29AM -0500, Arvind Sankar wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 07:54:58AM -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > >
> > > I'll leave it to others to figure out the exact details. But afaict it
> > > should be possible to have fine-grained-randomization and preserve the
> > > workaround in the end.
> > >
> >
> > the most obvious "solution" is to compile with an alignment of 4 bytes (so tight packing)
> > and then in the randomizer preserve the offset within 32 bytes, no matter what it is
> >
> > that would get you an average padding of 16 bytes which is a bit more than now but not too insane
> > (queue Kees' argument that tiny bits of padding are actually good)
> >
>
> With the patchset for adding the mbranches-within-32B-boundaries option,
> the section alignment gets forced to 32. With function-sections that
> means function alignment has to be 32 too.

We should be careful about enabling -mbranches-within-32B-boundaries.
It will hurt AMD, and presumably future Intel CPUs which don't need it.

--
Josh