[PATCH v1] arm: relocate: Replace ADR instruction with non-pseudo-instruction

[Andre Przywara]

On Sun, 10 Jul 2022 03:09:53 -0400
Jesse Taube <mr.bossman075 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jesse,

> In Binutils 2.37 the ADR instruction has changed
> use alternate instructions.

Can you elaborate on this? What has changed exactly, and why? Looking at
the commit you mention below I don't see an immediate problem that would
require code changes? Also it speaks of forward references, but this one
is not one?
And I didn't spot any difference between 2.38 and 2.35, at least not in my
isolated test (but I didn't bother to compile a whole stage 1 GCC with
newer binutils yet).

> The change causes armv7-m to not boot.

What does "causes armv7-m to not boot" mean? It compiles fine, but hangs
or crashes?
Can you show the relevant disassembly from both binutils versions?

And from trying to reproduce this minimally, do we need a ".syntax unified"
in the .S file? 

> Signed-off-by: Jesse Taube <Mr.Bossman075 at gmail.com>
> ---
>  arch/arm/lib/relocate.S | 8 +++++++-
>  1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/arch/arm/lib/relocate.S b/arch/arm/lib/relocate.S
> index 14b7f61c1a..22c419534f 100644
> --- a/arch/arm/lib/relocate.S
> +++ b/arch/arm/lib/relocate.S
> @@ -78,7 +78,13 @@ ENDPROC(relocate_vectors)
>   */
>  
>  ENTRY(relocate_code)
> -	adr	r3, relocate_code
> +/*
> + * Binutils doesn't comply with the arm docs for adr in thumb2
> + * from commit d3e52e120b68bf19552743fbc078e0a759f48cb7 onward
> + * to remove ambiguity explicitly define the pseudo-instruction
> + */
> +	mov r3, pc
> +	subs r3, #4

But this will break ARM, won't it? Because it would require to subtract #8?
I mean there is a reason for this adr instruction, because this offset
calculation is best left to the assembler. Not to speak of the fragility
of assuming that the relocate_code label is pointing to the very first
instruction. The ENTRY macro could also insert instructions.

Cheers,
Andre

>  	ldr	r1, _image_copy_start_ofs
>  	add	r1, r3			/* r1 <- Run &__image_copy_start */
>  	subs	r4, r0, r1		/* r4 <- Run to copy offset      */