On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 04:10:43PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> OK I've looked at this and I understand what's happening. PowerPC does
> not have a separate relocation type for GOT entries; instead it uses
> the same relocation type used for address constants global data. These
> do not get re-processed after the main program and libraries are
> added, because unlike GOT slots, they have addends, and if the addend
> is inline (using REL rather than RELA) then it's already been
> clobbered by the early relocation phase and can't easily be recovered.
> 
> I see three possible solutions:
> 
> 1. Treat R_PPC_ADDR32 as a GOT relocation instead of a regular
>    symbolic relocation in data. This would suppress the addend (giving
>    wrong address) if inline addends (REL) were used, but in practice
>    powerpc aways uses RELA. I consider this a hack, and perhaps risky,
>    since in principle someone could make powerpc binaries with REL.
> 
> 2. Re-process not just GOT type relocs, but also any RELA
>    (non-inline-addend) relocs again on the second pass. This would
>    work as long as powerpc only uses RELA, and if REL is ever used,
>    the worst that would happen is the current bug (losing environ,
>    etc.) rather than silently wrong relocations in global data. This
>    approach is not a hack, but I consider it something of an
>    incomplete fix.
> 
> 3. Re-process all symbolic relocations. For REL-type (inline addend),
>    we have to recover the original addend, which can be done by
>    calling find_sym again, but using ldso instead of the current
>    library chain head as the context to search for the symbol in, then
>    subtracting the resulting address to get back the original addend.
> 
> I like the third solution best, even though it incurs a small code
> size cost and a performance cost for archs using REL, because it's
> completely robust against any weird ways some archs might end up using
> relocations. The expected number of such relocations is tiny anyway;
> on my i386 builds it's 14.
> 
> If option 3 proves to be difficult or costly, however, we could
> consider option 2 as a temporary measure to get powerpc working. It
> wouldn't even need to be reverted, because option 3 includes/subsumes
> the work that would be done for option 2.

Attached is a patch to implement option 2. I'll probably commit it
soon anyway but here is it in case you want to test sooner. I verified
it fixes the test program on powerpc for me.

Rich