[PATCH] powerpc/vmlinux.lds: Drop .interp description
Vishal Chourasia
vishalc at linux.ibm.com
Tue Oct 21 19:18:31 AEDT 2025
On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 06:52:40PM +0100, Nathan Chancellor wrote:
> Commit da30705c4621 ("arch/powerpc: Remove .interp section in vmlinux")
> intended to drop the .interp section from vmlinux but even with this
> change, relocatable kernels linked with ld.lld contain an empty .interp
> section, which ends up causing crashes in GDB [1].
>
> $ make -skj"$(nproc)" ARCH=powerpc LLVM=1 clean pseries_le_defconfig vmlinux
>
> $ llvm-readelf -S vmlinux | grep interp
> [44] .interp PROGBITS c0000000021ddb34 21edb34 000000 00 A 0 0 1
>
> There appears to be a subtle difference between GNU ld and ld.lld when
> it comes to discarding sections that specify load addresses [2].
>
> Since '--no-dynamic-linker' prevents emission of the .interp section,
> there is no need to describe it in the output sections of the vmlinux
> linker script. Drop the .interp section description from vmlinux.lds.S
> to avoid this issue altogether.
>
> Link: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33481 [1]
> Link: https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues/2137 [2]
> Reported-by: Vishal Chourasia <vishalc at linux.ibm.com>
> Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/20251013040148.560439-1-vishalc@linux.ibm.com/
> Signed-off-by: Nathan Chancellor <nathan at kernel.org>
> ---
> arch/powerpc/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S | 1 -
> 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S b/arch/powerpc/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
> index de6ee7d35cff..15850296c0a9 100644
> --- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
> +++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
> @@ -330,7 +330,6 @@ SECTIONS
> }
> .hash : AT(ADDR(.hash) - LOAD_OFFSET) { *(.hash) }
> .gnu.hash : AT(ADDR(.gnu.hash) - LOAD_OFFSET) { *(.gnu.hash) }
> - .interp : AT(ADDR(.interp) - LOAD_OFFSET) { *(.interp) }
> .rela.dyn : AT(ADDR(.rela.dyn) - LOAD_OFFSET)
> {
> __rela_dyn_start = .;
>
> ---
> base-commit: 3a8660878839faadb4f1a6dd72c3179c1df56787
> change-id: 20251018-ppc-fix-lld-interp-1a78c361cd42
>
With this patch, I don't see .interp section being emitted the final
vmlinux binary.
```
(i) ❯ make LLVM=1 vmlinux
(i) ❯ llvm-readelf -p .comment vmlinux
String dump of section '.comment':
[ 1] clang version 22.0.0git (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project.git 7314565281ec28b745502c3f429fd431e16673eb)
[ 6d] Linker: LLD 22.0.0 (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project.git 7314565281ec28b745502c3f429fd431e16673eb)
(i) ❯ llvm-readelf -p .interp vmlinux
llvm-readelf: warning: 'vmlinux': could not find section '.interp'
```
Tested-by: Vishal Chourasia <vishalc at linux.ibm.com>
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