Re: [RFC PATCH v2 2/8] tools/nolibc: Remove .global _start from the entry point code

Nick Desaulniers
2022-03-22T18:07:31Z

On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 10:58 AM Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 10:30:53AM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 10:25 AM Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:
> > > The purpose is clearly *not* to implement a libc, but to have
> > > something very lightweight that allows to compile trivial programs. A good
> > > example of this is tools/testing/selftests/rcutorture/bin/mkinitrd.sh. I'm
> > > personally using a tiny pre-init shell that I always package with my
> > > kernels and that builds with them [1]. It will never do big things but
> > > the balance between ease of use and coding effort is pretty good in my
> > > experience. And I'm also careful not to make it complicated to use nor
> > > to maintain, pragmatism is important and the effort should remain on the
> > > program developer if some arbitration is needed.
> >
> > Neat, I bet that helps generate very small initrd! Got any quick size
> > measurements?
>
> Yep:
>
> First, the usual static printf("hello world!\n"):
>
> $ ll hello-*libc
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 willy dev 719232 Mar 22 18:50 hello-glibc*
> -rwxrwxr-x 1 willy dev 1248 Mar 22 18:51 hello-nolibc*

! What! Are those both statically linked?

> This one supports ~30-40 simple commands (mount/unmount, mknod, ls, ln),
> a tar extractor, multi-level braces, and boolean expression evaluation,
> variable expansion, and a config file parser to script all this. The code
> is 20 years old and is really ugly (even uglier than you think). But that
> gives an idea. 20 years ago the init was much simpler and 800 bytes (my
> constraint was for single floppies containing kernel+rootfs) and strings
> were manually merged by tails and put in .text to drop .rodata.

Oh, so nolibc has been around for a while then?

ld.lld will do string merging in that fashion at -O2 (the linker can
accept and optimization level). I did have a kernel patch for that
somewhere, need to update it for CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE...

I guess the tradeoff with strings in .text is that now the strings
themselves are r+x and not just r?

>
> You'll also note that there's 0 data segment above. That used to be
> convenient to further shrink programs, but these days given how linkers
> arrange segments by permissions that doesn't save as much as it used to,
> and it's likely that at some points I'll assume that there must be some
> variables by default (errno, environ, etc) and that we'll accept to invest
> a few extra tens of bytes by default for more convenience.

Thanks for the measurements.
--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers