ELF: Please provide a way to statically access Swift metadata without using a runtime call.

[grynspan]

Motivation

ELF images are generally stripped of their section header info, which means it's impossible to find sections at runtime. Swift loves storing metadata in sections.

Proposed solution

What if we used a "note" program header to contain a copy of this information? Program headers are not stripped, and "note" PHs are intended for arbitrary vendor use. We could imagine a program header whose desc field (i.e. payload) consists of a sequence of structures:

struct SectionInfo {
  char name[24];
  uintptr_t start;
  uintptr_t stop;
};

// Compiler or linker then emits something equivalent to this C array:
const SectionInfo desc[] = {
  { "swift5_protocols", &__start_swift5_protocols, &__stop_swift5_protocols },
  { "swift5_type_metadata", &__start_swift5_swift5_type_metadata, &__stop_swift5_type_metadata },
  ...
};

This data is then discoverable statically or at runtime by tools that include elf.h. This solves the problem of @_section data being undiscoverable in ELF binaries and helps Swift Testing do runtime metadata lookup without relying on the runtime-internal function swift_enumerateAllMetadataSections().

Linux, FreeBSD, and at least some other OSes that use ELF include dl_iterate_phdr() for enumerating program headers easily.

Alternatives considered

N/A

Additional information

N/A

[compnerd]

I'm not particularly fond of this approach. PT_NOTE sections are not guaranteed to be preserved as they are not required for loading. strip is permitted to remove any bits which are not required for loading the image.

[grynspan]

Well, what else in ELF could we borrow? Any ideas?

[grynspan]

My reading of the man page for strip is that it's permitted to remove these bits, but not required to do so nor expected to do so unless you explicitly tell it to.

I suppose we could place the data in a PT_LOAD with read-only permissions and add a sufficiently long magic byte sequence at the start to avoid any statistically significant risk of conflict with other loadable segments.

[compnerd]

We could add a custom section with the data that we need. As long as the section is marked with the load requirement, I think that it should be preserved.

[grynspan]

There doesn't appear to be any way to distinguish such a section from other LOADs, is there?

[al45tair]

FWIW, I'd previously experimented with using a PT_NOTE for this and abandoned that as a strategy. I don't recall exactly why — I think maybe there were issues with cross-section relocations? (I don't think we need worry too much about PT_NOTEs getting stripped, FWIW; that doesn't appear to happen in practice, and they're already used for some things where you wouldn't really want them stripped.)

We could add a custom section with the data that we need. As long as the section is marked with the load requirement, I think that it should be preserved.

As @grynspan says, that doesn't really help. Sections aren't preserved; it's only program headers (segments) that are preserved and those don't have names. In principle we could stuff all the metadata into a program header with a well-known segment type (the same way GCC puts .eh_frame_hdr data into PT_GNU_EH_FRAME, for instance), but doing so requires the use of a custom linker script. Or linker patches, but that will tie us to lld if we do that.

[grynspan]

I might be shooting myself in the foot here, but I do have a proof of concept for our use case (Swift Testing) that uses PT_NOTE effectively. I'm curious what caused you to abandon your previous efforts @al45tair and whether or not the addition of @_section changes the algebra.