• Julius Werner's avatar
    Add new alignment parameter to func assembler macro · 64726e6d
    Julius Werner authored
    
    
    Assembler programmers are used to being able to define functions with a
    specific aligment with a pattern like this:
    
        .align X
      myfunction:
    
    However, this pattern is subtly broken when instead of a direct label
    like 'myfunction:', you use the 'func myfunction' macro that's standard
    in Trusted Firmware. Since the func macro declares a new section for the
    function, the .align directive written above it actually applies to the
    *previous* section in the assembly file, and the function it was
    supposed to apply to is linked with default alignment.
    
    An extreme case can be seen in Rockchip's plat_helpers.S which contains
    this code:
    
      [...]
      endfunc plat_crash_console_putc
    
      .align 16
      func platform_cpu_warmboot
      [...]
    
    This assembles into the following plat_helpers.o:
    
      Sections:
      Idx Name                             Size  [...]  Algn
       9 .text.plat_crash_console_putc 00010000  [...]  2**16
      10 .text.platform_cpu_warmboot   00000080  [...]  2**3
    
    As can be seen, the *previous* function actually got the alignment
    constraint, and it is also 64KB big even though it contains only two
    instructions, because the .align directive at the end of its section
    forces the assembler to insert a giant sled of NOPs. The function we
    actually wanted to align has the default constraint. This code only
    works at all because the linker just happens to put the two functions
    right behind each other when linking the final image, and since the end
    of plat_crash_console_putc is aligned the start of platform_cpu_warmboot
    will also be. But it still wastes almost 64KB of image space
    unnecessarily, and it will break under certain circumstances (e.g. if
    the plat_crash_console_putc function becomes unused and its section gets
    garbage-collected out).
    
    There's no real way to fix this with the existing func macro. Code like
    
     func myfunc
     .align X
    
    happens to do the right thing, but is still not really correct code
    (because the function label is inserted before the .align directive, so
    the assembler is technically allowed to insert padding at the beginning
    of the function which would then get executed as instructions if the
    function was called). Therefore, this patch adds a new parameter with a
    default value to the func macro that allows overriding its alignment.
    
    Also fix up all existing instances of this dangerous antipattern.
    
    Change-Id: I5696a07e2fde896f21e0e83644c95b7b6ac79a10
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJulius Werner <jwerner@chromium.org>
    64726e6d
plat_helpers.S 5.06 KB