ghc, rts/Linker.c, OpenBSD and WXNEEDED and NOPIE

[Matthias Kilian]

Hi,

tl;dr: with shared / dynamic libs, is anything from rts/Linker.c
still in use? If so, where and why?

I hope this hasn't already been discussed in the past, and I apolotzie
if all this is no longer relevant for ghc-8.8 or newer (I'm still
at 8.6)...

On OpenBSD, I had to explicitely mark ghc as WXNEEDED (i.e. allow
it to map pages both as writable and executable), which I would
like to get rid of. Likewise, I had to do some dances to explicitely
disable PIE. If my memory doesn't fail completely, most (if not
all) oft his was because of rts/Linker.c mmapping objects to be
loaded at runtime and kind of simulating what dlopen() does for
shared objects.

Recently, thanks to Greg Steuck (who helped me a lot with this),
we updated our ghc port to ghc-8.6 and also enabled shared (or
dynamic, if you prefer this term) libraries.

So my hope was that the code in rts/Linker.c were no longer used
(because dynamic loading as done by ghci or template Haskell) could
be done with dlopen().

However, after building ghc-8.6 with all the WXNNEDED stuff removed,
and running ghci from this build, I still get an abort because pages
are mapped both writable and executable (I've configured my system
to abort processes when a W^X violation happens). Here's a backtrace
in case it's helpfull at all:

#0  _thread_sys___syscall () at -:3
#1  0x00000002010bb179 in _libc_mmap (addr=Variable "addr" is not available.) at /usr/src/lib/libc/sys/mmap.c:47
#2  0x000000021be22374 in mmapForLinker (bytes=Variable "bytes" is not available.) at rts/Linker.c:1029
#3  0x000000021be3e99b in m32_allocator_init () at rts/linker/M32Alloc.c:160
#4  0x00000002fd518be1 in cimc_info () from /usr/local/lib/ghc/bin/../ghci-8.6.4/libHSghci-8.6.4-ghc8.6.4.so
#5  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

Any thougts about this?

And, since W|X (and nopie) isn't good on any system: is anyone
working on getting rid of this for other unixes?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Ciao,
	Kili