Fwd: Re: Help debugging a dll issue

[Eliot Moss]

(Sorry for top post: meant to send this to the list
in the first place ... EM)


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Help debugging a dll issue
Date: Sat, 21 May 2016 23:14:09 -0400
From: Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: moss@cs.umass.edu
To: Duncan Roe <duncan_roe@acslink.net.au>

On 5/21/2016 10:58 PM, Duncan Roe wrote:
> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 07:30:37PM -0400, Eliot Moss wrote:
>> On 5/19/2016 10:54 PM, Eliot Moss wrote:
>>> Dear Cygwin friends --
>>>
>>> I am trying to get pypy to build under cygwin.  (It used to do so, but
>>> has not been maintained.)  I am very close, but there is something quite
>>> odd happening when trying to access the large dll that the system builds:
>>> the first call into that dll goes wild and causes a segfault.  The issue
>>> seems to lie with run-time linking, for I can use dlopen to open the dll
>>> and then dlsym to look up the function, and I get the same bad address.
>>> I see nothing wrong from nm and objdump.  The dll is about 70 million
>>> bytes long, so I can't really post it, but if you want to have a crack
>>> at this, we can find some mutually agreeable place and I can tell you
>>> the entry point I am trying to access.
>>>
>>> I have found that if I patch the indirection in the associated .exe file
>>> to refer to the actual address of the function, then the program runs,
>>> so it's just this one linkage that is not working (apparently).  Very
>>> mysterious to me.
>>
>> I used binary search, eliminating .o files from the .dll on the thought
>> that it was either a particular .o file that was leading to a problem,
>> or possibly the overall size (this is a huge link!).  I found that a .dll
>> with 58725 section 1 symbols (as reported by objdump -t) works, and one
>> with 66675 section one symbols fails.  So it appears to be a size issue.
>>
>> Is anyone out there skilled enough with gnu ld to guide me as to how to
>> keep that section from getting too big?  I tried --split-by-reloc, but
>> that gave no improvement (I don't think it's relocations that are the
>> problem, just the overall size of a section).  I'll try --split-by-file,
>> but I am doubting that is the right thing either.
>>
>> In fact, it is looking that the solution may be to get pypy to build
>> its .dll with fewer symbols in the symbol table, perhaps by suitable
>> use of __declspec(dllexport) and __declspec(dllimport), etc.  (These
>> are apparently deprecated in favor of __attribute__((visibility("hidden"))),
>> etc., but a number of those generate warnings that the visbility
>> attributes are not supported in this configuration!)
>>
>> Any thoughts from the populace?
>>
>> Regards -- EM
>>
> You surely tried this already: strip --strip-unneeded or --strip-debug?

A helpful thought, but no, it did not occur to me.  Getting pypy to run
that extra step in the middle of its build would involve hacking its process
of generating a Makefile, while it already had __declspec handling for the
Windows native build case, so it made sense to me to go that way for this
application -- but I'll file that away for future use!

Regards -- EM

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