splinkersets01 test assumptions

Kinsey Moore kinsey.moore at oarcorp.com
Tue Feb 16 21:26:31 UTC 2021


In verifying AArch64/ILP32 on hardware I ran across quite a few alignment issues,
some of which were caused by the use of SUBALIGN() in the linker scripts mentioned here:
https://devel.rtems.org/ticket/4178

SUBALIGN() was necessary for two reasons:

  *   libc sysinit linker sets (this can be fixed in the sysinit handler struct)
  *   splinkersets01 could not be made to pass on ILP32 as-is without SUBALIGN

It seems that splinkersets01 makes the assumption that linker sets are aligned to no more
than the size of a pointer. For ILP32, this is not the case since AArch64 hardware is very
sensitive to misaligned accesses and many structs in linker sections need to be aligned to
8-byte boundaries to avoid throwing exceptions. Some may even need to be aligned to
16-byte boundaries depending on the structure, but this doesn't apply to splinkersets01.
The resultant alignment padding causes many assertions in splinkersets01 to fail.

I'm trying to find a way to make everything work together, but I'd like some input.
The highlights with ILP32/LibBSD/hardware:

  *   current codebase: stuffs a struct into a linker section with bad alignment and throws an exception
  *   drop SUBALIGN and fix the sysinit issue: splinkersets01 fails, all other tests pass, code runs

Paths forward:

  *   disable splinkersets01 for AArch64/ILP32 BSPs
  *   attempt to detect section alignment and adjust splinkersets01 as necessary
  *   splitting the section up for different alignments would require touching every linker script
  *   ?

Hopefully I'm just missing something.

Thanks,
Kinsey
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