On 19/09/18 22:01, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
----- On Sep 19, 2018, at 1:38 PM, Szabolcs Nagy szabolcs.nagy@xxxxxxx wrote:
note that libpthread.so is built with -ftls-model=initial-exec
Which would indeed make these annotations redundant. I'll remove
them.
(and if it wasn't then you'd want to put the attribute on the
declaration in the internal header file, not on the definition,
so the actual tls accesses generate the right code)
This area is one where I'm still uneasy on my comprehension of
the details, especially that it goes in a different direction than
what you are recommending.
I've read through https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/tls.pdf Section 5
"Linker Optimizations" to try to figure it out, and I end up being
under the impression that applying the tls_model("initial-exec")
attribute to a symbol declaration in a header file does not have
much impact on the accesses that use that variable. Reading through
that section, it seems that the variable definition is the one that
matters, and then the compiler/linker/loader are tweaking the sites
that reference the TLS variable through code rewrite based on the
most efficient mechanism that each phase knows can be used at each
stage.
What am I missing ?
in general if you rely on linker relaxations you may not
get optimal code because the linker cannot remove
instructions, just nop them out.
(e.g. on aarch64 an initial-exec access is 4 instructions
a general dynamic (tlsdesc) access is 6 instructions +
it involves a call, so the return address has to be saved
and restored (+ 3 instructions for stack operations if
there were none otherwise, which the linker cannot change))
