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Re: Preventing preemption of 'protected' symbols in GNU ld 2.26 [aka should we revert the fix for 65248]


>> That is why protected visibility is such a mess.
>
> Not mess, but it comes with certain limitations.  And that's okay.  It's
> intended as an optimization, and it should do that optimization if
> requested, and error out if it can't be done for whatever reason.

I completely agree.

> E.g. one limitation might very well be that function pointer comparison
> for protected functions doesn't work (gives different outcomes if the
> pointer is built from inside the exe or from a shared lib).  (No matter
> how it's built, it will still _work_ when called).  Alternatively we can
> make comparison work (by using the exe PLT slot), in which case Alans
> testcase will need more complications to show that protected visibility
> currently is broken.  Alans testcase will work right now (as in showing
> protected being broken) on data symbols.

Function pointer comparison is also a mess, and is the only reason why
the treatment for protected function symbols is so complicated. It all
boils down the the language guarantees that (a) the address of a
function must be unique, (b) that the address of a given function must
always be the same value, and (c) that these guarantees survive a
conversion to void*.

I'd argue that all of these language guarantees are poor choices. Just
like constant strings, which are allowed to be pooled, two identical
functions ought to be allowed to be pooled (folded). If function
pointer comparison were restricted to function pointer types, we could
allow the address of a function to yield the address of a PLT entry,
and use a deep comparison to decide whether two unequal function
pointers were in fact equivalent.

But that's another topic for another day.

-cary


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