On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 09:54:18AM +0300, Mika Westerberg wrote: > This is needed to shut following compiler warning when CONFIG_PROC_VMCORE is > enabled: > > fs/proc/vmcore.c: In function 'parse_crash_elf64_headers': > fs/proc/vmcore.c:500: warning: passing argument 1 of 'elf_check_arch' from > incompatible pointer type > > ELF32 and ELF64 headers have common fields of same size (namely e_ident and > e_machine) which are checked in arm_elf_check_arch(). This patch is bogus - and shows the dangers of throwing casts into C code to shut up warnings without first analysing the code. Our elf_check_arch() uses: e_machine e_entry e_flags thusly: if (x->e_machine != EM_ARM) if (x->e_entry & 1) { } else if (x->e_entry & 3) eflags = x->e_flags; Now, the Elf32 header looks like this: typedef struct elf32_hdr{ unsigned char e_ident[EI_NIDENT]; /* 0x00 - 0x0F */ Elf32_Half e_type; /* 0x10 - 0x11 */ Elf32_Half e_machine; /* 0x12 - 0x13 */ Elf32_Word e_version; /* 0x14 - 0x17 */ Elf32_Addr e_entry; /* 0x18 - 0x1b */ Elf32_Off e_phoff; /* 0x1c - 0x1f */ Elf32_Off e_shoff; /* 0x20 - 0x23 */ Elf32_Word e_flags; /* 0x24 - 0x27 */ and Elf64 header: typedef struct elf64_hdr { unsigned char e_ident[EI_NIDENT]; /* 0x00 - 0x0F */ Elf64_Half e_type; /* 0x10 - 0x11 */ Elf64_Half e_machine; /* 0x12 - 0x13 */ Elf64_Word e_version; /* 0x14 - 0x17 */ Elf64_Addr e_entry; /* 0x18 - 0x1f */ Elf64_Off e_phoff; /* 0x20 - 0x27 */ Elf64_Off e_shoff; /* 0x28 - 0x2f */ Elf64_Word e_flags; /* 0x30 - 0x33 */ Notice that e_entry and e_flags are different sizes and/or different offsets, so ARMs elf_check_arch can not work with elf64 headers. So with an ELF64 header, accessing e_flags will result in actually accessing the top half of the 64-bit e_phoff, and accessing 32-bit e_entry will get us the lower half of the 64-bit e_entry. Now, here's the question: why does this crashkernel stuff want to parse a 64-bit ELF header on a 32-bit only platform where the crashing kernel will never generate a 64-bit ELF core file?