Re: [PATCH] arm64: vdso32: force vdso32 to be compiled as -marm

Will Deacon
2020-05-27T18:08:47Z

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 10:55:24AM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 6:45 AM Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@arm.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 2020-05-26 18:31, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> > > Custom toolchains that modify the default target to -mthumb cannot
> > > compile the arm64 compat vdso32, as
> > > arch/arm64/include/asm/vdso/compat_gettimeofday.h
> > > contains assembly that's invalid in -mthumb. Force the use of -marm,
> > > always.
> >
> > FWIW, this seems suspicious - the only assembly instructions I see there
> > are SWI(SVC), MRRC, and a MOV, all of which exist in Thumb for the
> > -march=armv7a baseline that we set.
> >
> > On a hunch, I've just bodged "VDSO_CFLAGS += -mthumb" into my tree and
> > built a Thumb VDSO quite happily with Ubuntu 19.04's
> > gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf. What was the actual failure you saw?
>
> From the link in the commit message: `write to reserved register 'R7'`
> https://godbolt.org/z/zwr7iZ
> IIUC r7 is reserved for the frame pointer in THUMB?
>
> What is the implicit default of your gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf at -O2?
> -mthumb, or -marm?

Hmm, but this *is* weird because if I build a 32-bit kernel then I get
either an ARM or a Thumb-2 VDSO depending on CONFIG_THUMB2_KERNEL. I'm
not sure if that's deliberate, but both build and appear to work.

I'll drop this patch for now, while we figure it out a bit more.

Cheers,

Will