36 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
36 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
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What: vDSO
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Date: July 2011
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KernelVersion: 3.0
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Contact: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
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Description:
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On some architectures, when the kernel loads any userspace program it
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maps an ELF DSO into that program's address space. This DSO is called
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the vDSO and it often contains useful and highly-optimized alternatives
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to real syscalls.
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These functions are called just like ordinary C function according to
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your platform's ABI. Call them from a sensible context. (For example,
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if you set CS on x86 to something strange, the vDSO functions are
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within their rights to crash.) In addition, if you pass a bad
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pointer to a vDSO function, you might get SIGSEGV instead of -EFAULT.
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To find the DSO, parse the auxiliary vector passed to the program's
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entry point. The AT_SYSINFO_EHDR entry will point to the vDSO.
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The vDSO uses symbol versioning; whenever you request a symbol from the
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vDSO, specify the version you are expecting.
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Programs that dynamically link to glibc will use the vDSO automatically.
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Otherwise, you can use the reference parser in
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tools/testing/selftests/vDSO/parse_vdso.c.
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Unless otherwise noted, the set of symbols with any given version and the
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ABI of those symbols is considered stable. It may vary across architectures,
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though.
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Note:
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As of this writing, this ABI documentation as been confirmed for x86_64.
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The maintainers of the other vDSO-using architectures should confirm
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that it is correct for their architecture.
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