Description
The GNU Toolchain microconference is the part of the GNU Tools track that focuses on specific topics related to the GNU Toolchain that have a direct impact in the development of the Linux kernel, and that can benefit from some live discussion and agreement between the GNU toolchain and kernel developers.
In 2019 Oracle contributed support for the eBPF (as of late renamed to just BPF) in-kernel virtual architecture to binutils and GCC. Since then we have continued working on the port, and recently sent a patch series upstream adding support for GDB and the GNU simulator.
After a brief description of the recent work done in this field, a set of points will be brought for discussion with the...
Last year we introduced support for the Compact C Type Format (CTF) into the GNU toolchain. We have since improved the linking of CTF so that types are properly deduplicated: the work is done by libctf on ld's behalf so that other programs can do what ld does. With the aid of a few dozen lines of makefile changes and a 300-odd line program using libctf, we can now produce a fully deduplicated...
Compare the status of GCC and Clang security features, and provide a time to discuss the progress on current work (e.g. auto-variable-initialization, caller-saved register clearing). More work is needed on sanitizers (e.g. bounds checking, arithmetic overflow handling) and Control Flow Integrity.
Linux gained a new process creation system call clone3() in 2019 for the 5.3 release. It provides a superset and hopefully cleaner semantics than legacy clone().
I'd like to discuss a few things related to it:
- How to expose this safely to other libraries: various libraries in userspace want to make use of it to get access to new features such as CLONE_INTO_CGROUP (notably systemd for...
