Re: vdso handling

Pedro Alves
2014-03-13T10:46:52Z

On 03/13/2014 10:07 AM, Pedro Alves wrote:
> Why's that? Why doesn't the memory-backed bfd paths take the same paths as
> a file-backed bfd internally in bfd? It sounds to me that this should be
> doable without duplication.

BTW, I meant that for vDSO's only. The vsyscall page is not an elf,
and therefore bfd still needs to be passed a template elf. For the
latter, GDB would indeed need to work with the segments. Do we still
care for vsyscall kernels? But for the former, bfd should just be
able to read the whole DSO as a plain elf.

Some glibc versions even include the vdso in the DSO list (*), and GDB
should be able to tell that that DSO is the vDSO (by matching addresses), and
load it completely from memory, still using a memory backed bfd, but _without_
a template. So with that in mind, bfd should be able to read the vdso
as a bfd from memory using the same paths as a file-backed bfd, except,
well, the bfd's backing store is in memory rather than in a file.

(*) note how linux-vdso.so.1 is listed by ldd, even if "info shared" in gdb
doesn't show it, on some systems.

--
Pedro Alves