On Tue, 2020-07-21 at 16:48 -0700, Palmer Dabbelt wrote: > > Why ? Branch distance limits ? You can't use trampolines ? > > Nothing fundamental, it's just that we don't have a large code model in the C > compiler. As a result all the global symbols are resolved as 32-bit > PC-relative accesses. We could fix this with a fast large code model, but > then > the kernel would need to relax global symbol references in modules and we > don't > even do that for the simple code models we have now. FWIW, some of the > proposed large code models are essentially just split-PLT/GOT and therefor > don't require relaxation, but at that point we're essentially PIC until we > have more that 2GiB of kernel text -- and even then, we keep all the > performance issues.
My memory might be out of date but I *think* we do it on powerpc without going to a large code model, but just having the in-kernel linker insert trampolines. Cheers, Ben.
