Re: BPF relocations

[Alexei Starovoitov <ast@fb.com>]

On 5/11/17 12:31 PM, David Miller wrote:
>
> I haven't done more work on bintuils BPF support because we
> need to figure out exactly what to do with relocations.  So
> I've been trying to spend time thinking about this.
>
> As far as I can tell the 64-bit BPF relocation llvm uses
> is used in two situations:
>
> 1) 64-bit relocations against data
>
> 2) 64-bit relocations against ldimm64 instructions
>
> If this is true it's a very bad decision that has ramifications for us
> right now.
>
> One must always explicitly define relocations as being against data or
> instruction fields.  You cannot use the same relocation for both kinds
> of transformations, somehow trying to figure out what to do
> "contextually".  That doesn't work.

why it doesn't work?
as far as i can see x86 doesn't care where the relo applies.
afaik relocations are divided into absolute, pc relative and pic 
relative and it doesn't matter whether they're against .text,
.eh_frame or .debug_* sections.

We have just two so far: absolute 32-bit and absolute 64-bit relocation.
I don't see what we would use pc-relative relo for.

If I remember correctly, the x64 and other cpus use pc-relative for
'call foo' insns since this is how those instructions work.
We don't have such calls yet.