Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 01:34 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
Hi folks, I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) == Problem statement = Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for all features that the application implements, even for features that are only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself imposes costs: - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact program startup and overall performance because of the additional indirections. - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts of the program. - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. == Proposed solution = I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if they aren’t reachable from the main partition. When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: Main partition: 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs 0x1000 .rodata 0x2000 .dynsym 0x3000 .text Loadable partition 1: 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs 0x5000 .rodata 0x6000 .dynsym 0x7000 .text Loadable partition 2: 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs 0x9000 .rodata 0xa000 .dynsym 0xb000 .text Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: .comment .debug_info (etc.) Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy that will extract the individual partitions from the output file essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC sections are left in place. The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main program $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so --extract-partition=libfeature.so On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the android_dlopen_ext <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at the correct relative address. == In more detail = Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with symbols will continue to be fixed. In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. == Other use cases = An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of doing so. == Prototype = A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more work. Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I intend to implement. Thanks, -- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/85c880b0/attachment.html>
Jake Ehrlich via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 02:22 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
Neat Idea.>In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for theloadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. Maybe all partitions can contain the same PT_LOAD segments? or the main partition contains all PT_LOAD segments for the entire address space? On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev < llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> Hi folks, > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > == Problem statement => > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as > it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be > stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a > dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. > These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of > splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact > program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > == Proposed solution => > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in > addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > Main partition: > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x1000 .rodata > 0x2000 .dynsym > 0x3000 .text > > Loadable partition 1: > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x5000 .rodata > 0x6000 .dynsym > 0x7000 .text > > Loadable partition 2: > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x9000 .rodata > 0xa000 .dynsym > 0xb000 .text > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > .comment > .debug_info > (etc.) > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext > <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function > passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the > correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish > to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to > their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a > regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic > loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at > the correct relative address. > > == In more detail => > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and > .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be > to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > == Other use cases => > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > == Prototype => > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the > feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > Thanks, > -- > -- > Peter > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/e4179bee/attachment-0001.html>
Michael Spencer via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 02:32 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev < cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> Hi folks, > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > == Problem statement => > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as > it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be > stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a > dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. > These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of > splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact > program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > == Proposed solution => > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in > addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > Main partition: > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x1000 .rodata > 0x2000 .dynsym > 0x3000 .text > > Loadable partition 1: > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x5000 .rodata > 0x6000 .dynsym > 0x7000 .text > > Loadable partition 2: > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x9000 .rodata > 0xa000 .dynsym > 0xb000 .text > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > .comment > .debug_info > (etc.) > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext > <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function > passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the > correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish > to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to > their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a > regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic > loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at > the correct relative address. > > == In more detail => > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and > .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be > to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > == Other use cases => > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > == Prototype => > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the > feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > Thanks, > -- > -- > Peter > >This is an interesting idea. What's the behaivor for calling an unloaded function? Would it be hard to make that force a load? An interesting way to do it would be to map the other partitions without execute privs and load the partition on a fault, although this would require restricting the alignment of partitions to the page size. - Michael Spencer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/690e628d/attachment.html>
Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 02:36 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 6:23 PM Jake Ehrlich <jakehehrlich at google.com> wrote:> Neat Idea. > > >In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > Maybe all partitions can contain the same PT_LOAD segments? or the main > partition contains all PT_LOAD segments for the entire address space? >I don't think this will work. When the main partition is loaded, the dynamic loader will try to map all of the PT_LOADs, and with this approach since they won't exist in the main partition (due to the p_offset being out of bounds), the dynamic loader will likely raise an error or crash. The per-partition PT_LOADs also give a convenient way for llvm-objcopy to figure out which section headers need to be copied into each partition. Another possibility that I considered for reserving the address space was to extend the p_memsz of the last segment of the main partition to cover the address space of the other partitions. But this prevents tools such as unwinders from easily mapping an address onto a DSO by examining PT_LOAD segments. For example, this is what libunwind does: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/e739ac0e255597d818c907223034ddf3bc18a593/libunwind/src/AddressSpace.hpp#L523 Peter> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev < > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically >> partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve >> adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) >> >> == Problem statement =>> >> Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are >> typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications >> must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for >> all features that the application implements, even for features that are >> only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split >> applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so >> that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. >> This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the >> main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that >> exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the >> part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself >> imposes costs: >> - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as >> it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be >> stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a >> dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. >> These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of >> splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact >> program startup and overall performance because of the additional >> indirections. >> - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the >> program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the >> main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they >> call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional >> ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from >> the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) >> or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts >> of the program. >> - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each >> piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop >> working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program >> devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow >> integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs >> because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). >> There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program >> could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the >> main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. >> However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding >> mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be >> maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. >> >> == Proposed solution =>> >> I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning >> automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. >> The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an >> executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at >> fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These >> binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to >> one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic >> relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first >> place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). >> >> The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability >> algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry >> points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, >> either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global >> variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the >> partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the >> partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a >> single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC >> roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we >> call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main >> partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are >> allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable >> partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from >> multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if >> they aren’t reachable from the main partition. >> >> When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, >> in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input >> section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by >> partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are >> left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: >> >> Main partition: >> 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x1000 .rodata >> 0x2000 .dynsym >> 0x3000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 1: >> 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x5000 .rodata >> 0x6000 .dynsym >> 0x7000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 2: >> 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x9000 .rodata >> 0xa000 .dynsym >> 0xb000 .text >> >> Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: >> .comment >> .debug_info >> (etc.) >> >> Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a >> single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This >> isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to >> the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy >> that will extract the individual partitions from the output file >> essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can >> also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections are left in place. >> >> The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main >> program >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections >> -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature >> $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so >> -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so >> --extract-partition=libfeature.so >> >> On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the >> android_dlopen_ext >> <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function >> passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the >> correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish >> to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to >> their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a >> regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic >> loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at >> the correct relative address. >> >> == In more detail =>> >> Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the >> dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, >> .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, >> .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT >> with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with >> symbols will continue to be fixed. >> >> In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the >> loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address >> later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a >> page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the >> last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to >> cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to >> ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. >> >> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker >> scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this >> feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. >> >> Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and >> .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be >> to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. >> >> == Other use cases =>> >> An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating >> system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will >> be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. >> This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the >> shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), >> together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the >> private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the >> private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of >> doing so. >> >> == Prototype =>> >> A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: >> https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols >> There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the >> feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on >> https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully >> tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints >> and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more >> work. >> >> Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what >> I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go >> in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is >> at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I >> intend to implement. >> >> Thanks, >> -- >> -- >> Peter >> _______________________________________________ >> LLVM Developers mailing list >> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org >> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev >> >-- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/0b374509/attachment.html>
Eli Friedman via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 02:41 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
This seems like a very complicated approach… do you have some numbers to give some idea how much of an improvement we’re talking about here over a more conventional solution involving shared libraries? Or have you not gotten that far? What’s the tradeoff involved in the specific sections you chose to split? It seems like it would be possible to, for example, split the GOT, or avoid splitting the relocation/EH/etc. sections. Some variation would require different runtime support, I guess. It looks like this doesn’t include a proposal for the corresponding LLVM IR extension? I think it might be sort of complicated to define correctly… specifically, in terms of what it means to “use” a function or global from a different partition (so the program doesn’t try to speculatively access something which isn’t loaded). This could come up even without LTO if you have C++ inline functions, since all functions with weak linkage have to be in the first partition. (At least, I think they do, unless you invent a new kind of “partition” visibility for this.) -Eli From: cfe-dev <cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> On Behalf Of Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2019 5:35 PM To: llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>; cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> Cc: George Rimar <grimar at accesssoftek.com> Subject: [EXT] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries Hi folks, I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) == Problem statement = Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for all features that the application implements, even for features that are only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself imposes costs: - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact program startup and overall performance because of the additional indirections. - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts of the program. - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. == Proposed solution = I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if they aren’t reachable from the main partition. When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: Main partition: 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs 0x1000 .rodata 0x2000 .dynsym 0x3000 .text Loadable partition 1: 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs 0x5000 .rodata 0x6000 .dynsym 0x7000 .text Loadable partition 2: 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs 0x9000 .rodata 0xa000 .dynsym 0xb000 .text Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: .comment .debug_info (etc.) Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy that will extract the individual partitions from the output file essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC sections are left in place. The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main program $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so --extract-partition=libfeature.so On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the android_dlopen_ext<https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at the correct relative address. == In more detail = Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with symbols will continue to be fixed. In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. == Other use cases = An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of doing so. == Prototype = A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more work. Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I intend to implement. Thanks, -- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190227/3b46a392/attachment-0001.html>
Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 02:48 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 6:32 PM Michael Spencer <bigcheesegs at gmail.com> wrote:> On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev < > cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically >> partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve >> adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) >> >> == Problem statement =>> >> Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are >> typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications >> must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for >> all features that the application implements, even for features that are >> only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split >> applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so >> that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. >> This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the >> main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that >> exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the >> part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself >> imposes costs: >> - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as >> it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be >> stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a >> dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. >> These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of >> splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact >> program startup and overall performance because of the additional >> indirections. >> - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the >> program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the >> main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they >> call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional >> ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from >> the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) >> or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts >> of the program. >> - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each >> piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop >> working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program >> devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow >> integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs >> because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). >> There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program >> could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the >> main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. >> However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding >> mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be >> maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. >> >> == Proposed solution =>> >> I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning >> automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. >> The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an >> executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at >> fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These >> binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to >> one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic >> relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first >> place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). >> >> The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability >> algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry >> points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, >> either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global >> variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the >> partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the >> partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a >> single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC >> roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we >> call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main >> partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are >> allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable >> partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from >> multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if >> they aren’t reachable from the main partition. >> >> When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, >> in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input >> section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by >> partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are >> left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: >> >> Main partition: >> 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x1000 .rodata >> 0x2000 .dynsym >> 0x3000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 1: >> 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x5000 .rodata >> 0x6000 .dynsym >> 0x7000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 2: >> 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x9000 .rodata >> 0xa000 .dynsym >> 0xb000 .text >> >> Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: >> .comment >> .debug_info >> (etc.) >> >> Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a >> single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This >> isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to >> the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy >> that will extract the individual partitions from the output file >> essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can >> also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections are left in place. >> >> The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main >> program >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections >> -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature >> $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so >> -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so >> --extract-partition=libfeature.so >> >> On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the >> android_dlopen_ext >> <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function >> passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the >> correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish >> to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to >> their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a >> regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic >> loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at >> the correct relative address. >> >> == In more detail =>> >> Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the >> dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, >> .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, >> .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT >> with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with >> symbols will continue to be fixed. >> >> In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the >> loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address >> later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a >> page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the >> last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to >> cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to >> ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. >> >> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker >> scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this >> feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. >> >> Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and >> .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be >> to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. >> >> == Other use cases =>> >> An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating >> system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will >> be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. >> This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the >> shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), >> together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the >> private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the >> private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of >> doing so. >> >> == Prototype =>> >> A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: >> https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols >> There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the >> feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on >> https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully >> tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints >> and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more >> work. >> >> Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what >> I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go >> in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is >> at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I >> intend to implement. >> >> Thanks, >> -- >> -- >> Peter >> >> > This is an interesting idea. What's the behaivor for calling an unloaded > function? Would it be hard to make that force a load? An interesting way > to do it would be to map the other partitions without execute privs and > load the partition on a fault, although this would require restricting the > alignment of partitions to the page size. >It may be possible with a sophisticated runtime. Right now the reserved space is mapped without privs so you would SIGSEGV when calling the function. But you could imagine a signal handler that responds to SIGSEGV by mapping the other partition. However, if you're in a position to do that, I don't see a huge advantage to that over just mapping the other partition and letting the system page fault it in. The main advantage is where the machine running the program is storage or bandwidth constrained, requiring you to do something complicated (such as downloading the other partition from the internet) in order to start using it, and that likely couldn't be done easily in the context of a signal handler. But note that in general, with this scheme it would not be possible to call an unloaded function directly, because calling the function would create a reference to the function via a relocation, which would cause it to be moved into either the same partition as the caller or the main partition, guaranteeing its availability. The intended usage mode is that the main partition would access the other partitions exclusively via dlopen/dlsym. Thanks, -- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/3bd077b4/attachment.html>
Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 03:47 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 6:41 PM Eli Friedman <efriedma at quicinc.com> wrote:> This seems like a very complicated approach… do you have some numbers to > give some idea how much of an improvement we’re talking about here over a > more conventional solution involving shared libraries? Or have you not > gotten that far? >I can talk to my internal customer to see what kind of overhead they were seeing. But I do know that at the start of the project they did evaluate using regular dynamic linking for the feature partitions, and that was quickly rejected in favour of other approaches due to the code size and maintenance overhead. And with control flow integrity the binary size of the cross-DSO metadata dwarfed the binary size savings that they were hoping to gain by splitting their program in two. Furthermore, there are things that you simply cannot do with a more conventional approach, such as optimizations relying on whole-program information (like whole-program devirtualization, which helps significantly in my customer's program). What’s the tradeoff involved in the specific sections you chose to split?> It seems like it would be possible to, for example, split the GOT, or avoid > splitting the relocation/EH/etc. sections. Some variation would require > different runtime support, I guess. >We could certainly consider having multiple GOTs which are allocated to partitions in the same way as sections are. This might be useful if for example one of the partitions references a DSO that is unused by the main program and we need to avoid having the main program depend on the DSO. But I consider this an optimization over the proposed approach and not something that would be strictly required for correctness. I chose to omit this for now for the sake of simplicity and because my customer does not require it for now. I think we need to split the dynamic relocation section because otherwise the dynamic loader will try to relocate the unreadable memory of the other partitions and cause a SIGSEGV. Similarly, we need to split the EH sections because unwinders will generally expect to be able to find the unwind info for a function by enumerating PT_LOADs to map an address onto a DSO and then using that DSO's PT_ARM_EXIDX/PT_GNU_EH_FRAME to find the unwind info. See for example what libunwind does: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/e739ac0e255597d818c907223034ddf3bc18a593/libunwind/src/AddressSpace.hpp#L523 As you point out, the latter part could vary based on the runtime, but I don't see a strong reason to do it another way.> It looks like this doesn’t include a proposal for the corresponding LLVM > IR extension? I think it might be sort of complicated to define correctly… > specifically, in terms of what it means to “use” a function or global from > a different partition (so the program doesn’t try to speculatively access > something which isn’t loaded). This could come up even without LTO if you > have C++ inline functions, since all functions with weak linkage have to be > in the first partition. (At least, I think they do, unless you invent a > new kind of “partition” visibility for this.) >The idea here is that for code to "use" a function or global is exactly the same thing as having a relocation pointing to it. This is the same principle that is used to implement --gc-sections. So for a program to end up accessing a section (speculatively or otherwise) there needs to be a chain of relocations referring to it from the entry points. That would force the section into either the main partition or the same partition as the referent. Another way to think about it is: when I load the main partition into memory, I have loaded all code that is reachable from the main partition's entry points. Now I dynamically load a feature partition. I've now loaded all code that is reachable from the combination of the main partition and the feature partition's entry points. That's pretty much the same thing as having first loaded a conventional ELF DSO linked with --gc-sections with just the main partition's entry points, and then replacing it with a second DSO linked with --gc-sections with the main partition + feature partition's entry points, except that none of the addresses in the main partition happen to have changed. So if --gc-sections works, this should work too. You might be wondering: what happens if I directly reference one of the feature partition's entry points from the main partition? Well, something interesting will happen. The feature partition's dynamic symbol table will contain an entry for the entry point, but the entry's address will point inside the main partition. This should work out just fine because the main partition is guaranteed to be loaded if the feature partition is also loaded. (Which is the same reason why direct pc-relative references from the feature partition to the main partition will also work.) I don't think any significant IR extensions are necessary here, except perhaps for the part involving attaching the -fsymbol-partition names to globals, but I think that part is mostly trivial and it would probably end up looking like the custom section name field. I'm not sure I understand how weak linkage is impacted here. With this nothing special happens inside the linker until we start handling --gc-sections, and by that time weak/strong resolution has already happened. In ELF, dynamic loaders do not care about symbol bindings (except for weak undefined symbols), so we get the same result whether the symbols are weak or not. Peter> > > -Eli > > > > *From:* cfe-dev <cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> *On Behalf Of *Peter > Collingbourne via cfe-dev > *Sent:* Tuesday, February 26, 2019 5:35 PM > *To:* llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>; cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> > *Cc:* George Rimar <grimar at accesssoftek.com> > *Subject:* [EXT] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries > > > > Hi folks, > > > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > > > == Problem statement => > > > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as > it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be > stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a > dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. > These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of > splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact > program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > > > > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > > > == Proposed solution => > > > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in > addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > > > Main partition: > > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x1000 .rodata > > 0x2000 .dynsym > > 0x3000 .text > > > > Loadable partition 1: > > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x5000 .rodata > > 0x6000 .dynsym > > 0x7000 .text > > > > Loadable partition 2: > > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x9000 .rodata > > 0xa000 .dynsym > > 0xb000 .text > > > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > > .comment > > .debug_info > > (etc.) > > > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext > <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function > passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the > correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish > to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to > their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a > regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic > loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at > the correct relative address. > > > > == In more detail => > > > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and > .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be > to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > > > == Other use cases => > > > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > > > == Prototype => > > > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the > feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > > > Thanks, > > -- > > -- > > Peter >-- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/1addea2e/attachment.html>
James Y Knight via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 04:37 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
I've long wanted a related-but-different form of this sort of thing. What I want is to be able to statically link _independent_ binaries (either executables or shared libraries), which happen to depend on a lot of the same code. And, then, to save space by reducing the amount of duplicated code between them. The way I imagined it is that it if I link two programs, the linker would emit three resulting files: Program 1, Program 2, and a shared-library containing the common code. As input, I'd give the linker, separately, the lists of objects/libraries to go into Program 1, and those to go into Program 2. It would do its normal static archive search/object-file-selection process separately for each list. After collecting the object file lists, any objects that ended up used both in #1 and #2 would go into the shared-library, while the others would go into their own separate programs. (Note that this then causes static initializers to end up being run/included in the expected programs in the same way as with plain static linking.) Finally, gc-sections should do its graph coloring starting only from the entry-points of the two programs, but also coloring through into the automatic shared library. In the end, the shared library should only contain functions that are used by at least one of the programs. (As I described it, this mechanism would leave functions used only by one program that came from an object file used by both programs in the shared-lib. Alternatively, the graph coloring could possibly determine the target location of the function, too) Without any new loader hacks, you'd still have some additional overhead, but since the symbol names in the automatic shared library are irrelevant (other than needing to be unique), they can be shortened to reduce the string-table overhead and reduce the risk of external-usage. In the end, you'd have two completely normal binaries, which use a normal shared object -- but the shared lib was auto-generated, with meaningless private symbols, only exporting the minimum set of symbols it needs to in order to let the dynamic loader load it into the exact programs it was compiled for. On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev < cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> Hi folks, > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > == Problem statement => > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as > it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be > stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a > dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. > These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of > splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact > program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > == Proposed solution => > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in > addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > Main partition: > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x1000 .rodata > 0x2000 .dynsym > 0x3000 .text > > Loadable partition 1: > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x5000 .rodata > 0x6000 .dynsym > 0x7000 .text > > Loadable partition 2: > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x9000 .rodata > 0xa000 .dynsym > 0xb000 .text > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > .comment > .debug_info > (etc.) > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext > <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function > passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the > correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish > to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to > their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a > regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic > loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at > the correct relative address. > > == In more detail => > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and > .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be > to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > == Other use cases => > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > == Prototype => > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the > feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > Thanks, > -- > -- > Peter > _______________________________________________ > cfe-dev mailing list > cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/ad8446f9/attachment-0001.html>
Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 05:45 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
Interesting. It sounds like you basically want to be able to do automatic busyboxing. Maybe you can achieve something like this with my approach by reversing the role of the library and the binary. You could have the main program do something like: int main(int argc, char **argv) { void *p = dlopen("lib" + argv[0] + ".so"); // not quite right but you get the idea void (*f)(int, char **) = dlsym(p, argv[0] + "_main"); return f(argc, argv); } And then rename the programs' main functions to foo_main, bar_main etc., and have them be exported from partitions named libfoo.so, libbar.so etc. Now all the single-program code would end up in the partitions, the shared code would end up in the main binary and could be referred to directly from the partitions. But this would still rely on loader support of course and all of the static initialization would be moved to the binary (depending on your program, maybe this isn't a huge deal). It might be nice to avoid needing the loader change, but that would mean that you're now dealing with multiple address spaces (and depending on how the programs look, multiple symbol tables), which makes things significantly more complicated in the linker. There's also a new constraint in the --gc-sections graph coloring because without further changes it's now possible for --gc-sections to split an object file between address spaces (i.e. between DSOs), and most of the time an object file will assume that it can use direct relocations to refer to its own sections, which isn't possible with a split object file. So --gc-sections would probably need to work on a per object file basis. Peter On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:37 PM James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com> wrote:> I've long wanted a related-but-different form of this sort of thing. > > What I want is to be able to statically link _independent_ binaries > (either executables or shared libraries), which happen to depend on a lot > of the same code. And, then, to save space by reducing the amount of > duplicated code between them. > > The way I imagined it is that it if I link two programs, the linker would > emit three resulting files: Program 1, Program 2, and a shared-library > containing the common code. > > As input, I'd give the linker, separately, the lists of objects/libraries > to go into Program 1, and those to go into Program 2. It would do its > normal static archive search/object-file-selection process separately for > each list. After collecting the object file lists, any objects that ended > up used both in #1 and #2 would go into the shared-library, while the > others would go into their own separate programs. > > (Note that this then causes static initializers to end up being > run/included in the expected programs in the same way as with plain static > linking.) > > Finally, gc-sections should do its graph coloring starting only from the > entry-points of the two programs, but also coloring through into the > automatic shared library. In the end, the shared library should only > contain functions that are used by at least one of the programs. (As I > described it, this mechanism would leave functions used only by one program > that came from an object file used by both programs in the shared-lib. > Alternatively, the graph coloring could possibly determine the target > location of the function, too) > > Without any new loader hacks, you'd still have some additional overhead, > but since the symbol names in the automatic shared library are irrelevant > (other than needing to be unique), they can be shortened to reduce the > string-table overhead and reduce the risk of external-usage. > > In the end, you'd have two completely normal binaries, which use a normal > shared object -- but the shared lib was auto-generated, with meaningless > private symbols, only exporting the minimum set of symbols it needs to in > order to let the dynamic loader load it into the exact programs it was > compiled for. > > > > On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev < > cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically >> partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve >> adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) >> >> == Problem statement =>> >> Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are >> typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications >> must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for >> all features that the application implements, even for features that are >> only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split >> applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so >> that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. >> This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the >> main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that >> exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the >> part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself >> imposes costs: >> - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as >> it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be >> stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a >> dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. >> These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of >> splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact >> program startup and overall performance because of the additional >> indirections. >> - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the >> program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the >> main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they >> call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional >> ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from >> the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) >> or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts >> of the program. >> - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each >> piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop >> working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program >> devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow >> integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs >> because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). >> There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program >> could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the >> main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. >> However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding >> mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be >> maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. >> >> == Proposed solution =>> >> I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning >> automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. >> The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an >> executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at >> fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These >> binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to >> one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic >> relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first >> place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). >> >> The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability >> algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry >> points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, >> either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global >> variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the >> partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the >> partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a >> single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC >> roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we >> call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main >> partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are >> allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable >> partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from >> multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if >> they aren’t reachable from the main partition. >> >> When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, >> in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input >> section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by >> partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are >> left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: >> >> Main partition: >> 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x1000 .rodata >> 0x2000 .dynsym >> 0x3000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 1: >> 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x5000 .rodata >> 0x6000 .dynsym >> 0x7000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 2: >> 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x9000 .rodata >> 0xa000 .dynsym >> 0xb000 .text >> >> Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: >> .comment >> .debug_info >> (etc.) >> >> Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a >> single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This >> isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to >> the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy >> that will extract the individual partitions from the output file >> essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can >> also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections are left in place. >> >> The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main >> program >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections >> -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature >> $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so >> -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so >> --extract-partition=libfeature.so >> >> On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the >> android_dlopen_ext >> <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function >> passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the >> correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish >> to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to >> their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a >> regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic >> loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at >> the correct relative address. >> >> == In more detail =>> >> Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the >> dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, >> .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, >> .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT >> with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with >> symbols will continue to be fixed. >> >> In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the >> loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address >> later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a >> page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the >> last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to >> cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to >> ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. >> >> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker >> scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this >> feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. >> >> Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and >> .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be >> to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. >> >> == Other use cases =>> >> An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating >> system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will >> be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. >> This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the >> shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), >> together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the >> private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the >> private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of >> doing so. >> >> == Prototype =>> >> A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: >> https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols >> There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the >> feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on >> https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully >> tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints >> and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more >> work. >> >> Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what >> I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go >> in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is >> at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I >> intend to implement. >> >> Thanks, >> -- >> -- >> Peter >> _______________________________________________ >> cfe-dev mailing list >> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org >> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev >> >-- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190226/848c0240/attachment.html>
Peter Smith via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 12:18 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
Hello, When I first read this I thought that this is kind of like overlays, but optimising for flash size rather than memory size and with the dynamic linker as a simplified non-evicting overlay manager. However I think it might be more accurate to describe as a way of integrating features implemented in shared libraries into an application? Do you have an idea of how the development process would work for such an application? It sounds to me like this isn't going to work well for "here is an executable that I've already written wrote go find the bits can be split off into partitions". I'd expect that this is more of a, "here is an application that has been implemented with some independent features implemented in shared libraries (natural but heavy weight partitions) that I want to be optimised together at the cost of (realistically) losing the shared part of the libraries.". I'm thinking that one possible development model for you would be first implement your independent feature as a shared library, the entry points for the partition could then be extracted from it, with perhaps the inputs to the shared library link step being extracted for the main application (eliminating duplicates between the partitions would be interesting). My main concern with this is that this could end being fragile, with subtle bugs that would be difficult to reason about ahead of time and without the feature implemented on a desktop OS it could be very difficult to test that a new feature would work with it, or whether a change to an existing feature would break it. I think we'd need some extensive documentation to go with it at the least. Peter Some other thoughts below:> We could certainly consider having multiple GOTs which are allocated to partitions in the same way as sections are. This might be useful if for example one of the partitions references a DSO that is unused by the main program and we need to avoid having the main program depend on the DSO. But I consider > this an optimization over the proposed approach and not something that would be strictly required for correctness. I chose to omit this for now for the sake of simplicity and because my customer does not require it for now.Introducing multiple GOTs might make it difficult to reason about GOT relative relocations, is it always unambiguous which GOT a relocation should refer to? Can we answer that question for all targets?> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives.I'd recommend not going there unless you have a really good model of how it will work and what type of scripts are compatible with it. It would be incredibly easy to write something to break the assumptions that this is relying on. An ifunc in one of the loadable partitions could be problematic as there is only one PLT and GOT in the application, with the ifunc dynamic relocation running eagerly at application launch but no resolver present in memory at the time. You'll also need to be careful to prevent any sharing of things like strings between the partitions. On Wed, 27 Feb 2019 at 01:34, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:> > Hi folks, > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > == Problem statement => > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for all features that the application implements, even for features that are only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself imposes costs: > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact program startup and overall performance because of the additional indirections. > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts of the program. > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > == Proposed solution => > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > Main partition: > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x1000 .rodata > 0x2000 .dynsym > 0x3000 .text > > Loadable partition 1: > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x5000 .rodata > 0x6000 .dynsym > 0x7000 .text > > Loadable partition 2: > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x9000 .rodata > 0xa000 .dynsym > 0xb000 .text > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > .comment > .debug_info > (etc.) > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy that will extract the individual partitions from the output file essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC sections are left in place. > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main program > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the android_dlopen_ext function passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at the correct relative address. > > == In more detail => > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with symbols will continue to be fixed. > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > == Other use cases => > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of doing so. > > == Prototype => > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more work. > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I intend to implement. > > Thanks, > -- > -- > Peter
Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 21:07 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 4:19 AM Peter Smith <peter.smith at linaro.org> wrote:> Hello, > > When I first read this I thought that this is kind of like overlays, > but optimising for flash size rather than memory size and with the > dynamic linker as a simplified non-evicting overlay manager. However I > think it might be more accurate to describe as a way of integrating > features implemented in shared libraries into an application? >Yes, this is sort of like overlays, except that they're automatic (unlike the linker script OVERLAY feature, which relies on manually partitioning the program between object files) and non-overlapping (so that you can load multiple of them). The intent is exactly that features would live in the shared libraries. Do you have an idea of how the development process would work for such> an application? It sounds to me like this isn't going to work well for > "here is an executable that I've already written wrote go find the > bits can be split off into partitions". I'd expect that this is more > of a, "here is an application that has been implemented with some > independent features implemented in shared libraries (natural but > heavy weight partitions) that I want to be optimised together at the > cost of (realistically) losing the shared part of the libraries.". I'm > thinking that one possible development model for you would be first > implement your independent feature as a shared library, the entry > points for the partition could then be extracted from it, with perhaps > the inputs to the shared library link step being extracted for the > main application (eliminating duplicates between the partitions would > be interesting). >Yes, the intent is that a developer adopting this feature could start with an application that is already split into multiple conventional DSOs, and then adjust their cflags and ldflags in order to link both the application and the features in a single step. That by itself could result in code size savings from any code that was already being statically linked into multiple binaries. Then they would be in a position to start switching symbol visibilities over to hidden in order to remove dynsym entries and cause more code to be moved into the loadable partitions. My main concern with this is that this could end being fragile, with> subtle bugs that would be difficult to reason about ahead of time and > without the feature implemented on a desktop OS it could be very > difficult to test that a new feature would work with it, or whether a > change to an existing feature would break it. I think we'd need some > extensive documentation to go with it at the least. >Yes, that's a concern for me as well. The situation is not too different from the relocation packing features, which AFAIK are only supported by the Android and ChromeOS dynamic loaders, but admittedly this proposed feature will probably end up touching more code. I think it is mitigated by the fact that one of the first intended users of this feature will be part of Chromium, and Chromium is continuously tested with top-of-tree LLVM on most platforms including Android, which means that we should find out about any breakage quickly. I do intend to contribute user documentation since it will be needed in order to understand how to use the feature and we can't simply refer to GNU documentation for this.> > Peter > > Some other thoughts below: > > > We could certainly consider having multiple GOTs which are allocated to > partitions in the same way as sections are. This might be useful if for > example one of the partitions references a DSO that is unused by the main > program and we need to avoid having the main program depend on the DSO. But > I consider > this an optimization over the proposed approach and not > something that would be strictly required for correctness. I chose to omit > this for now for the sake of simplicity and because my customer does not > require it for now. > > Introducing multiple GOTs might make it difficult to reason about GOT > relative relocations, is it always unambiguous which GOT a relocation > should refer to? Can we answer that question for all targets? >I think it should be unambiguous: a GOT entry would be allocated to the partition containing all GOT generating relocations to the symbol if there is such a partition, or the main partition if not. I'm not sure what should happen on MIPS which has its own weird multi-GOT thing. I'll probably just make this feature unsupported on MIPS.> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > I'd recommend not going there unless you have a really good model of > how it will work and what type of scripts are compatible with it. It > would be incredibly easy to write something to break the assumptions > that this is relying on. >Agreed.> An ifunc in one of the loadable partitions could be problematic as > there is only one PLT and GOT in the application, with the ifunc > dynamic relocation running eagerly at application launch but no > resolver present in memory at the time.Yes, I probably should have realised that ifuncs could be an issue. They'll probably all need to be placed in the main partition unless we have multiple GOTs. You'll also need to be careful> to prevent any sharing of things like strings between the partitions. >In my prototype all mergeable sections will end up in the main partition but I think we'd eventually want them to also participate in the graph colouring (a good fraction of the loadable partition is expected to be made up of strings). Strings would be placed similarly to GOT entries: in the same partition if all refs come from that partition or in the main partition if not. Peter> > On Wed, 27 Feb 2019 at 01:34, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote: > > > > Hi folks, > > > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > > > == Problem statement => > > > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, > as it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to > be stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing > side a dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be > present. These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose > of splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also > impact program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > > > == Proposed solution => > > > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, > in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > > > Main partition: > > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x1000 .rodata > > 0x2000 .dynsym > > 0x3000 .text > > > > Loadable partition 1: > > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x5000 .rodata > > 0x6000 .dynsym > > 0x7000 .text > > > > Loadable partition 2: > > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > > 0x9000 .rodata > > 0xa000 .dynsym > > 0xb000 .text > > > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > > .comment > > .debug_info > > (etc.) > > > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext function passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force > it to be loaded at the correct address relative to the main partition. > Other platforms that wish to support this feature will likely either need > to add a similar feature to their dynamic loader or (in order to support > loading the partitions with a regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag > that will cause the dynamic loader to first load the main partition and > then the loadable partition at the correct relative address. > > > > == In more detail => > > > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp > and .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will > be to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each > partition. > > > > == Other use cases => > > > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > > > == Prototype => > > > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates > the feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > > > Thanks, > > -- > > -- > > Peter >-- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190227/b878358e/attachment.html>
Joerg Sonnenberger via llvm-dev
2019-Feb-27 23:52 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 11:37:16PM -0500, James Y Knight via cfe-dev wrote:> What I want is to be able to statically link _independent_ binaries (either > executables or shared libraries), which happen to depend on a lot of the > same code. And, then, to save space by reducing the amount of duplicated > code between them.crunchgen in NetBSD does essentially the first half. -ffunction-sections could do a bit of the second part, but I'm not sure if you actually save much. Joerg
Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev
2019-Mar-02 01:38 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
Somehow I missed this email. This is an interesting proposal. I guess that Chrome on Android is a candidate program to apply this. I wonder what are other programs you can apply this scheme. Looks like as long as you want to split a program into multiple small pieces sharing the same memory address space, this is applicable. One thing I can think of as an example of it is the kernel module. Is there anything other than that? On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:34 PM Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:> Hi folks, > > I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically > partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve > adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) > > == Problem statement => > Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are > typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications > must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for > all features that the application implements, even for features that are > only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split > applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so > that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. > This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the > main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that > exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the > part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself > imposes costs: > - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as > it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be > stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a > dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. > These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of > splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact > program startup and overall performance because of the additional > indirections. > - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the > program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the > main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they > call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional > ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from > the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) > or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts > of the program. > - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each > piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop > working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program > devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow > integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs > because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). > There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program > could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the > main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. > However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding > mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be > maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. > > == Proposed solution => > I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning > automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. > The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an > executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at > fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These > binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to > one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic > relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first > place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). > > The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability > algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry > points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, > either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global > variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the > partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the > partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a > single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC > roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we > call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main > partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are > allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable > partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from > multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if > they aren’t reachable from the main partition. > > When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, in > addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input > section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by > partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC > sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are > left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: > > Main partition: > 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x1000 .rodata > 0x2000 .dynsym > 0x3000 .text > > Loadable partition 1: > 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x5000 .rodata > 0x6000 .dynsym > 0x7000 .text > > Loadable partition 2: > 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs > 0x9000 .rodata > 0xa000 .dynsym > 0xb000 .text > > Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: > .comment > .debug_info > (etc.) > > Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a > single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This > isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to > the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy > that will extract the individual partitions from the output file > essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can > also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC > sections are left in place. > > The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main > program > $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections > -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature > $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so > -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so > $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so > --extract-partition=libfeature.so > > On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the > android_dlopen_ext > <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function > passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the > correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish > to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to > their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a > regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic > loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at > the correct relative address. > > == In more detail => > Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the > dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, > .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, > .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT > with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with > symbols will continue to be fixed. > > In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the > loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address > later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a > page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the > last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to > cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to > ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. > > I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker > scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this > feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. > > Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and > .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be > to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. > > == Other use cases => > An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating > system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will > be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. > This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the > shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), > together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the > private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the > private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of > doing so. > > == Prototype => > A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: > https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols > There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the > feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on > https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully > tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints > and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more > work. > > Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what > I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go > in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is > at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I > intend to implement. > > Thanks, > -- > -- > Peter >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190301/2699935a/attachment-0001.html>
Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev
2019-Mar-02 01:42 UTC
[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:38 PM James Y Knight via llvm-dev < llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> I've long wanted a related-but-different form of this sort of thing. > > What I want is to be able to statically link _independent_ binaries > (either executables or shared libraries), which happen to depend on a lot > of the same code. And, then, to save space by reducing the amount of > duplicated code between them. > > The way I imagined it is that it if I link two programs, the linker would > emit three resulting files: Program 1, Program 2, and a shared-library > containing the common code. > > As input, I'd give the linker, separately, the lists of objects/libraries > to go into Program 1, and those to go into Program 2. It would do its > normal static archive search/object-file-selection process separately for > each list. After collecting the object file lists, any objects that ended > up used both in #1 and #2 would go into the shared-library, while the > others would go into their own separate programs. > > (Note that this then causes static initializers to end up being > run/included in the expected programs in the same way as with plain static > linking.) > > Finally, gc-sections should do its graph coloring starting only from the > entry-points of the two programs, but also coloring through into the > automatic shared library. In the end, the shared library should only > contain functions that are used by at least one of the programs. (As I > described it, this mechanism would leave functions used only by one program > that came from an object file used by both programs in the shared-lib. > Alternatively, the graph coloring could possibly determine the target > location of the function, too) > > Without any new loader hacks, you'd still have some additional overhead, > but since the symbol names in the automatic shared library are irrelevant > (other than needing to be unique), they can be shortened to reduce the > string-table overhead and reduce the risk of external-usage. > > In the end, you'd have two completely normal binaries, which use a normal > shared object -- but the shared lib was auto-generated, with meaningless > private symbols, only exporting the minimum set of symbols it needs to in > order to let the dynamic loader load it into the exact programs it was > compiled for. >I wonder what is the difference of having three files (2 executables and 1 DSO) and having a single binary containing all code and data. It is not too hard to link two programs together (which is what busybox does, IIUC), and the resulting executable would be as compact as the sum of the three different files. If you execute a busybox'ed executable, only the needed part is mapped to memory, so I guess you wouldn't lose anything at runtime. What am I missing?> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 8:35 PM Peter Collingbourne via cfe-dev < > cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically >> partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve >> adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) >> >> == Problem statement =>> >> Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are >> typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications >> must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for >> all features that the application implements, even for features that are >> only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split >> applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so >> that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. >> This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the >> main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that >> exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the >> part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself >> imposes costs: >> - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as >> it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be >> stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a >> dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. >> These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of >> splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact >> program startup and overall performance because of the additional >> indirections. >> - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the >> program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the >> main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they >> call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional >> ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from >> the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) >> or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts >> of the program. >> - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each >> piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop >> working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program >> devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow >> integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs >> because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). >> There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program >> could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the >> main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. >> However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding >> mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be >> maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. >> >> == Proposed solution =>> >> I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning >> automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. >> The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an >> executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at >> fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These >> binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to >> one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic >> relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first >> place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). >> >> The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability >> algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry >> points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, >> either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global >> variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the >> partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the >> partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a >> single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC >> roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we >> call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main >> partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are >> allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable >> partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from >> multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if >> they aren’t reachable from the main partition. >> >> When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, >> in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input >> section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by >> partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are >> left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: >> >> Main partition: >> 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x1000 .rodata >> 0x2000 .dynsym >> 0x3000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 1: >> 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x5000 .rodata >> 0x6000 .dynsym >> 0x7000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 2: >> 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x9000 .rodata >> 0xa000 .dynsym >> 0xb000 .text >> >> Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: >> .comment >> .debug_info >> (etc.) >> >> Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a >> single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This >> isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to >> the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy >> that will extract the individual partitions from the output file >> essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can >> also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections are left in place. >> >> The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main >> program >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections >> -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature >> $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so >> -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so >> --extract-partition=libfeature.so >> >> On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the >> android_dlopen_ext >> <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function >> passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the >> correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish >> to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to >> their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a >> regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic >> loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at >> the correct relative address. >> >> == In more detail =>> >> Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the >> dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, >> .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, >> .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT >> with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with >> symbols will continue to be fixed. >> >> In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the >> loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address >> later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a >> page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the >> last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to >> cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to >> ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. >> >> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker >> scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this >> feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. >> >> Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and >> .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be >> to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. >> >> == Other use cases =>> >> An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating >> system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will >> be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. >> This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the >> shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), >> together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the >> private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the >> private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of >> doing so. >> >> == Prototype =>> >> A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: >> https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols >> There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the >> feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on >> https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully >> tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints >> and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more >> work. >> >> Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what >> I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go >> in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is >> at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I >> intend to implement. >> >> Thanks, >> -- >> -- >> Peter >> _______________________________________________ >> cfe-dev mailing list >> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org >> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev >> > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev
2019-Mar-02 01:51 UTC
[llvm-dev] RFC: Linker feature for automatically partitioning a program into multiple binaries
I covered the example of the operating system API in the original proposal, but yes, you might also be able to use this for kernel modules. The justification isn't as great for them since kernels typically require linker scripts, and I'm not planning to make this compatible with linker scripts. But if you did manage to write a kernel that didn't need a linker script, this seems like it might be useful. Peter On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 5:39 PM Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:> Somehow I missed this email. > > This is an interesting proposal. I guess that Chrome on Android is a > candidate program to apply this. I wonder what are other programs you can > apply this scheme. Looks like as long as you want to split a program into > multiple small pieces sharing the same memory address space, this is > applicable. One thing I can think of as an example of it is the kernel > module. Is there anything other than that? > > On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:34 PM Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> > wrote: > >> Hi folks, >> >> I'd like to propose adding a feature to ELF lld for automatically >> partitioning a program into multiple binaries. (This will also involve >> adding a feature to clang, so I've cc'd cfe-dev as well.) >> >> == Problem statement =>> >> Embedded devices such as cell phones, especially lower end devices, are >> typically highly resource constrained. Users of cell phone applications >> must pay a cost (in terms of download size as well as storage space) for >> all features that the application implements, even for features that are >> only used by a minority of users. Therefore, there is a desire to split >> applications into multiple pieces that can be downloaded independently, so >> that the majority of users only pay the cost of the commonly used features. >> This can technically be achieved using traditional ELF dynamic linking: the >> main part of the program can be compiled as an executable or DSO that >> exports symbols that are then imported by a separate DSO containing the >> part of the program implementing the optional feature. However, this itself >> imposes costs: >> - Each exported symbol by itself imposes additional binary size costs, as >> it requires the name of the symbol and a dynamic symbol table entry to be >> stored in both the exporting and importing DSO, and on the importing side a >> dynamic relocation, a GOT entry and likely a PLT entry must be present. >> These additional costs go some way towards defeating the purpose of >> splitting the program into pieces in the first place, and can also impact >> program startup and overall performance because of the additional >> indirections. >> - It can result in more code needing to appear in the main part of the >> program than necessary. For example, imagine that both the feature and the >> main program make use of a common (statically linked) library, but they >> call different subsets of the functions in that library. With traditional >> ELF linking we are forced to either link and export the entire library from >> the main program (even the functions unused by either part of the program) >> or carefully maintain a list of functions that are used by the other parts >> of the program. >> - Since the linker does not see the whole program at once and links each >> piece independently, a number of link-time optimizations and features stop >> working, such as LTO across partition boundaries, whole-program >> devirtualization and non-cross-DSO control flow integrity (control flow >> integrity has a cross-DSO mode, but that also imposes binary size costs >> because a significant amount of metadata needs to appear in each DSO). >> There are ways around at least the first point. For example, the program >> could arrange to use a custom mechanism for binding references between the >> main program and the feature code, such as a table of entry points. >> However, this can impose maintenance costs (for example, the binding >> mechanism can be intrusive in the source code and typically has to be >> maintained manually), and it still does not address the last point. >> >> == Proposed solution =>> >> I propose to extend lld so that it can perform the required partitioning >> automatically, given a set of entry points for each part of the program. >> The end product of linking will be a main program (which can be either an >> executable or a DSO) combined with a set of DSOs that must be loaded at >> fixed addresses relative to the base address of the main program. These >> binaries will all share a virtual address space so that they can refer to >> one another directly using PC-relative references or RELATIVE dynamic >> relocations as if they were all statically linked together in the first >> place, rather than via the GOT (or custom GOT-equivalent). >> >> The way that it will work is that we can extend the graph reachability >> algorithm currently implemented by the linker for --gc-sections. The entry >> points for each partition are marked up with a string naming the partition, >> either at the source level with an attribute on the function or global >> variable, or by passing a flag to the compiler (this string becomes the >> partition's soname). These symbols will act as the GC roots for the >> partition and will be exported from its dynsym. Assuming that there is a >> single partition, let's call this set of symbols S2, while all other GC >> roots (e.g. non-marked-up exported symbols, sections in .init_array) we >> call S1. Any sections reachable from S1 are allocated to the main >> partition, while sections reachable only from S2 but not from S1 are >> allocated to S2's partition. We can extend this idea to multiple loadable >> partitions by defining S3, S4 and so on, but any sections reachable from >> multiple loadable partitions are allocated to the main partition even if >> they aren’t reachable from the main partition. >> >> When assigning input sections to output sections, we take into account, >> in addition to the name of the input section, the partition that the input >> section is assigned to. The SHF_ALLOC output sections are first sorted by >> partition, and then by the usual sorting rules. As usual, non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections appear last and are not sorted by partition. In the end we are >> left with a collection of output sections that might look like this: >> >> Main partition: >> 0x0000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x1000 .rodata >> 0x2000 .dynsym >> 0x3000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 1: >> 0x4000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x5000 .rodata >> 0x6000 .dynsym >> 0x7000 .text >> >> Loadable partition 2: >> 0x8000 ELF header, phdrs >> 0x9000 .rodata >> 0xa000 .dynsym >> 0xb000 .text >> >> Non-SHF_ALLOC sections from all partitions: >> .comment >> .debug_info >> (etc.) >> >> Now linking proceeds mostly as usual, and we’re effectively left with a >> single .so that contains all of the partitions concatenated together. This >> isn’t very useful on its own and is likely to confuse tools (e.g. due to >> the presence of multiple .dynsyms); we can add a feature to llvm-objcopy >> that will extract the individual partitions from the output file >> essentially by taking a slice of the combined .so file. These slices can >> also be fed to tools such as debuggers provided that the non-SHF_ALLOC >> sections are left in place. >> >> The envisaged usage of this feature is as follows: >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -c main.c # compile the main >> program >> $ clang -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections >> -fsymbol-partition=libfeature.so -c feature.c # compile the feature >> $ clang main.o feature.o -fuse-ld=lld -shared -o libcombined.so >> -Wl,-soname,libmain.so -Wl,--gc-sections >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libmain.so --extract-partition=libmain.so >> $ llvm-objcopy libcombined.so libfeature.so >> --extract-partition=libfeature.so >> >> On Android, the loadable partitions can be loaded with the >> android_dlopen_ext >> <https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/libdl> function >> passing ANDROID_DLEXT_RESERVED_ADDRESS to force it to be loaded at the >> correct address relative to the main partition. Other platforms that wish >> to support this feature will likely either need to add a similar feature to >> their dynamic loader or (in order to support loading the partitions with a >> regular dlopen) define a custom dynamic tag that will cause the dynamic >> loader to first load the main partition and then the loadable partition at >> the correct relative address. >> >> == In more detail =>> >> Each loadable partition will require its own sections to support the >> dynamic loader and unwinder (namely: .ARM.exidx, .dynamic, .dynstr, >> .dynsym, .eh_frame_hdr, .gnu.hash, .gnu.version, .gnu.version_r, .hash, >> .interp, .rela.dyn, .relr.dyn), but will be able to share a GOT and PLT >> with the main partition. This means that all addresses associated with >> symbols will continue to be fixed. >> >> In order to cause the dynamic loader to reserve address space for the >> loadable partitions so that they can be loaded at the correct address >> later, a PT_LOAD segment is added to the main partition that allocates a >> page of bss at the address one byte past the end of the last address in the >> last partition. In the Android dynamic loader at least, this is enough to >> cause the required space to be reserved. Other platforms would need to >> ensure that their dynamic loader implements similar behaviour. >> >> I haven't thought about how this feature will interact with linker >> scripts. At least to start with we will likely need to forbid using this >> feature together with the PHDRS or SECTIONS linker script directives. >> >> Some sections will need to be present in each partition (e.g. .interp and >> .note sections). Probably the most straightforward way to do this will be >> to cause the linker to create a clone of these sections for each partition. >> >> == Other use cases =>> >> An example of another use case for this feature could be an operating >> system API which is exposed across multiple DSOs. Typically these DSOs will >> be implemented using private APIs that are not exposed to the application. >> This feature would allow you to create a common DSO that contains the >> shared code implementing the private APIs (i.e. the main partition), >> together with individual DSOs (i.e. the loadable partitions) that use the >> private APIs and expose the public ones, but without actually exposing the >> private APIs in the dynamic symbol table or paying the binary size cost of >> doing so. >> >> == Prototype =>> >> A prototype/proof of concept of this feature has been implemented here: >> https://github.com/pcc/llvm-project/tree/lld-module-symbols >> There is a test app in the test-progs/app directory that demonstrates the >> feature on Android with a simple hello world app (based on >> https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html ). I have successfully >> tested debugging the loadable partition with gdb (e.g. setting breakpoints >> and printing globals), but getting unwinding working will need a bit more >> work. >> >> Note that the feature as exposed by the prototype is different from what >> I'm proposing here, e.g. it uses a linker flag to specify which symbols go >> in which partitions. I think the best place to specify this information is >> at either the source level or the compiler flag level, so that is what I >> intend to implement. >> >> Thanks, >> -- >> -- >> Peter >> >-- -- Peter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20190301/8d8d5d12/attachment.html>
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