Description of problem: A change in binutils 2.22.52.0.1 causes empty sections that are relative to be absolute instead. This causes some problems when building a 32-bit kernel and having it relocated as sections that are supposed to be relative are marked absolute and break the boot. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/18/230 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): binutils-2.22.52.0.1-10.fc17.i686 How reproducible: Always from what I can tell. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Build a kernel with the above binutils 2. Look at system.map and see if __init_begin and __init_end are absolute symbols (among others) 3. Have something relocate the kernel and watch it crash Actual results: Symbols are absolute Expected results: symbols are relative Additional info: We've not seen anything along the lines of actual bug reports in the kernel because of this to my knowledge. Peter Jones mentioned that we don't normally relocate kernels on BIOS machines, but we do on EFI so this might be important. H.J. suggests that 2.22.52.0.2 is similarly broken. The upstream binutils report is here: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14052
While the problem exhibits itself on 32-bit kernels because we postprocess them, it isn't strictly limited to 32-bit. An x86_64 kernel built with the same version of binutils also has the same section being marked as absolute.
If the only practical impact of this would be booting a 32-bit kernel EFI, then I'm -1 blocker, because we don't support that. If this is all theoretically Bad and Scary but does not in actual fact break anything noticeable for any supported use case (32-bit BIOS boot, 64-bit BIOS and EFI boots) then there's no reason to block release for it. -- Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
Well, 32-bit EFI isn't a concern since we don't ship that at all. The cases where we'd hit this appear to be: 1) 32-bit BIOS + kdump (which I doubt if there are that many users of) and 2) some 32-bit BIOS systems with really strange memory maps. I don't think these are very common either, since we didn't relocate for *years* and it wasn't a big problem on BIOS systems. So I'm also -1 on blocker status, but I could be +1 for NTH if there's a clean fix. Note that the fix mentioned on irc won't help case #2, since the hardware in question would still not work.
Discussed in the 2012-05-18 blocker bug review meeting. Rejected as a blocker for Fedora 17 final because the only way that a user could hit this on a configuration supported by Fedora is using kdump with a 32-bit kernel or using uncommon hardware. As such, it can be fixed with an update and not a blocker.
Created attachment 586057 [details] Import of fix for PR14052 This patch replaces binutils-2.22.52.0.1-ld-13621.patch. It is an import of the fix for the upstream PR 14052, and will be applied to the F17 binutils once the release is out. The rawhide binutils do not need this patch.
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