Re: Relocations to use when eliding plts

["H.J. Lu" <hjl dot tools at gmail dot com>]

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 8:38 AM, Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net> wrote:
> On 05/28/2015 01:36 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
>> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 09:40:57PM +0200, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 03:29:02PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
>>>>> You're not missing anything.  But do you want the performance of a
>>>>> library to depend on how the main executable is compiled?
>>>>
>>>> Not directly. But I'd rather be in that situation than have
>>>> pessimizations in library codegen to avoid it. I'm worried about cases
>>>> where code both loads the address of a function and calls it, such as
>>>> this (stupid) example:
>>>>
>>>>     a((void *)a);
>>>
>>> That can be handled by using just one GOT slot, the non-.got.plt one;
>>> only if there are only relocations that guarantee that address equality is
>>> not important it would use the faster (*_JUMP_SLOT?) relocations.
>>
>> How far would this extend, e.g. in the case of LTO or compiling the
>> whole library at once?
>
> It depends on how difficult that becomes, I suppose.  It's certainly something
> that we can look for during LTO.
>
> I did in fact mention this exact point in the original message:
>
>> This does leave open other optimization questions, mostly around weak
>> functions.  Consider constructs like
>>
>>       if (foo) foo();
>>
>> Do we, within the compiler, try to CSE GOTPCREL and GOTPLTPCREL, accepting the
>> possibility (not certainty) of jump-to-jump but definitely avoiding a separate
>> load insn and the latency implied by that?
>
> As a last resort the two can always be unified at static link time, so that
> only one got slot is created, and only one runtime relocation exists.  At which
> point we'd still have two loads in the insn stream.  But barring preemption,
> the second load will be from cache and cost a single cycle.
>
> So which is less likely, this double-use of a function pointer, or a non-PIE
> executable?

Can you try hjl/no-plt branch in GCC git mirror with -fno-plt?
I got

[hjl@gnu-6 pr18458]$ make
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -O2 -g -fno-plt   -c -o
main.o main.c
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -O2 -g -fno-plt -fpic
-c -o a.o a.c
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -O2 -g -fno-plt
-Wl,-z,now -shared -o a.so a.o
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -O2 -g -fno-plt -fpic
-c -o b.o b.c
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -O2 -g -fno-plt
-Wl,-z,now -shared -o b.so b.o a.so
/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc/xgcc
-B/export/build/gnu/gcc/build-x86_64-linux/gcc -Wl,-rpath=. -Wl,-z,now
-o main main.o a.so b.so
./main
PASS
[hjl@gnu-6 pr18458]$ readelf -r main

Relocation section '.rela.dyn' at offset 0x4b0 contains 4 entries:
  Offset          Info           Type           Sym. Value    Sym. Name + Addend
000000600a20  000200000006 R_X86_64_GLOB_DAT 0000000000000000 b + 0
000000600a28  000500000006 R_X86_64_GLOB_DAT 0000000000000000
__libc_start_main@GLIBC_2.2.5 + 0
000000600a30  000600000006 R_X86_64_GLOB_DAT 0000000000000000 __gmon_start__ + 0
000000600a38  000800000006 R_X86_64_GLOB_DAT 0000000000000000 a + 0
[hjl@gnu-6 pr18458]$ gdb main
GNU gdb (GDB) Fedora 7.7.1-21.fc20
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.
For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from main...done.
(gdb) r
Starting program: /export/home/hjl/bugs/binutils/pr18458/main
PASS
[Inferior 1 (process 10663) exited normally]
Missing separate debuginfos, use: debuginfo-install glibc-2.18-19.2.fc20.x86_64
(gdb) b b
Breakpoint 1 at 0x7ffff7bf75f0: file b.c, line 5.
(gdb) r
Starting program: /export/home/hjl/bugs/binutils/pr18458/main

Breakpoint 1, b () at b.c:5
5  a();
(gdb) si
a () at a.c:5
5  printf("PASS\n");
(gdb)


-- 
H.J.