The CTF file format has always supported "external strtabs", which
internally are strtab offsets with their MSB on: such refs
get their strings from the strtab passed in at CTF file open time:
this is usually intended to be the ELF strtab, and that's what this
implementation is meant to support, though in theory the external
strtab could come from anywhere.
This commit adds support for these external strings in the ctf-string.c
strtab tracking layer. It's quite easy: we just add a field csa_offset
to the atoms table that tracks all strings: this field tracks the offset
of the string in the ELF strtab (with its MSB already on, courtesy of a
new macro CTF_SET_STID), and adds a new function that sets the
csa_offset to the specified offset (plus MSB). Then we just need to
avoid writing out strings to the internal strtab if they have csa_offset
set, and note that the internal strtab is shorter than it might
otherwise be.
(We could in theory save a little more time here by eschewing sorting
such strings, since we never actually write the strings out anywhere,
but that would mean storing them separately and it's just not worth the
complexity cost until profiling shows it's worth doing.)
We also have to go through a bit of extra effort at variable-sorting
time. This was previously using direct references to the internal
strtab: it couldn't use ctf_strptr or ctf_strraw because the new strtab
is not yet ready to put in its usual field (in a ctf_file_t that hasn't
even been allocated yet at this stage): but now we're using the external
strtab, this will no longer do because it'll be looking things up in the
wrong strtab, with disastrous results. Instead, pass the new internal
strtab in to a new ctf_strraw_explicit function which is just like
ctf_strraw except you can specify a ne winternal strtab to use.
But even now that it is using a new internal strtab, this is not quite
enough: it can't look up strings in the external strtab because ld
hasn't written it out yet, and when it does will write it straight to
disk. Instead, when we write the internal strtab, note all the offset
-> string mappings that we have noted belong in the *external* strtab to
a new "synthetic external strtab" dynhash, ctf_syn_ext_strtab, and look
in there at ctf_strraw time if it is set. This uses minimal extra
memory (because only strings in the external strtab that we actually use
are stored, and even those come straight out of the atoms table), but
let both variable sorting and name interning when ctf_bufopen is next
called work fine. (This also means that we don't need to filter out
spurious ECTF_STRTAB warnings from ctf_bufopen but can pass them back to
the caller, once we wrap ctf_bufopen so that we have a new internal
variant of ctf_bufopen etc that we can pass the synthetic external
strtab to. That error has been filtered out since the days of Solaris
libctf, which didn't try to handle the problem of getting external
strtabs right at construction time at all.)
v3: add the synthetic strtab and all associated machinery.
v5: fix tabdamage.
include/
* ctf.h (CTF_SET_STID): New.
libctf/
* ctf-impl.h (ctf_str_atom_t) <csa_offset>: New field.
(ctf_file_t) <ctf_syn_ext_strtab>: Likewise.
(ctf_str_add_ref): Name the last arg.
(ctf_str_add_external) New.
(ctf_str_add_strraw_explicit): Likewise.
(ctf_simple_open_internal): Likewise.
(ctf_bufopen_internal): Likewise.
* ctf-string.c (ctf_strraw_explicit): Split from...
(ctf_strraw): ... here, with new support for ctf_syn_ext_strtab.
(ctf_str_add_ref_internal): Return the atom, not the
string.
(ctf_str_add): Adjust accordingly.
(ctf_str_add_ref): Likewise. Move up in the file.
(ctf_str_add_external): New: update the csa_offset.
(ctf_str_count_strtab): Only account for strings with no csa_offset
in the internal strtab length.
(ctf_str_write_strtab): If the csa_offset is set, update the
string's refs without writing the string out, and update the
ctf_syn_ext_strtab. Make OOM handling less ugly.
* ctf-create.c (struct ctf_sort_var_arg_cb): New.
(ctf_update): Handle failure to populate the strtab. Pass in the
new ctf_sort_var arg. Adjust for ctf_syn_ext_strtab addition.
Call ctf_simple_open_internal, not ctf_simple_open.
(ctf_sort_var): Call ctf_strraw_explicit rather than looking up
strings by hand.
* ctf-hash.c (ctf_hash_insert_type): Likewise (but using
ctf_strraw). Adjust to diagnose ECTF_STRTAB nonetheless.
* ctf-open.c (init_types): No longer filter out ECTF_STRTAB.
(ctf_file_close): Destroy the ctf_syn_ext_strtab.
(ctf_simple_open): Rename to, and reimplement as a wrapper around...
(ctf_simple_open_internal): ... this new function, which calls
ctf_bufopen_internal.
(ctf_bufopen): Rename to, and reimplement as a wrapper around...
(ctf_bufopen_internal): ... this new function, which sets
ctf_syn_ext_strtab.
ctf.h states:
> [...] the CTF string table does not contain any duplicated strings.
Unfortunately this is entirely untrue: libctf has before now made no
attempt whatsoever to deduplicate the string table. It computes the
string table's length on the fly as it adds new strings to the dynamic
CTF file, and ctf_update() just writes each string to the table and
notes the current write position as it traverses the dynamic CTF file's
data structures and builds the final CTF buffer. There is no global
view of the strings and no deduplication.
Fix this by erasing the ctf_dtvstrlen dead-reckoning length, and adding
a new dynhash table ctf_str_atoms that maps unique strings to a list
of references to those strings: a reference is a simple uint32_t * to
some value somewhere in the under-construction CTF buffer that needs
updating to note the string offset when the strtab is laid out.
Adding a string is now a simple matter of calling ctf_str_add_ref(),
which adds a new atom to the atoms table, if one doesn't already exist,
and adding the location of the reference to this atom to the refs list
attached to the atom: this works reliably as long as one takes care to
only call ctf_str_add_ref() once the final location of the offset is
known (so you can't call it on a temporary structure and then memcpy()
that structure into place in the CTF buffer, because the ref will still
point to the old location: ctf_update() changes accordingly).
Generating the CTF string table is a matter of calling
ctf_str_write_strtab(), which counts the length and number of elements
in the atoms table using the ctf_dynhash_iter() function we just added,
populating an array of pointers into the atoms table and sorting it into
order (to help compressors), then traversing this table and emitting it,
updating the refs to each atom as we go. The only complexity here is
arranging to keep the null string at offset zero, since a lot of code in
libctf depends on being able to leave strtab references at 0 to indicate
'no name'. Once the table is constructed and the refs updated, we know
how long it is, so we can realloc() the partial CTF buffer we allocated
earlier and can copy the table on to the end of it (and purge the refs
because they're not needed any more and have been invalidated by the
realloc() call in any case).
The net effect of all this is a reduction in uncompressed strtab sizes
of about 30% (perhaps a quarter to a half of all strings across the
Linux kernel are eliminated as duplicates). Of course, duplicated
strings are highly redundant, so the space saving after compression is
only about 20%: when the other non-strtab sections are factored in, CTF
sizes shrink by about 10%.
No change in externally-visible API or file format (other than the
reduction in pointless redundancy).
libctf/
* ctf-impl.h: (struct ctf_strs_writable): New, non-const version of
struct ctf_strs.
(struct ctf_dtdef): Note that dtd_data.ctt_name is unpopulated.
(struct ctf_str_atom): New, disambiguated single string.
(struct ctf_str_atom_ref): New, points to some other location that
references this string's offset.
(struct ctf_file): New members ctf_str_atoms and ctf_str_num_refs.
Remove member ctf_dtvstrlen: we no longer track the total strlen
as we add strings.
(ctf_str_create_atoms): Declare new function in ctf-string.c.
(ctf_str_free_atoms): Likewise.
(ctf_str_add): Likewise.
(ctf_str_add_ref): Likewise.
(ctf_str_purge_refs): Likewise.
(ctf_str_write_strtab): Likewise.
(ctf_realloc): Declare new function in ctf-util.c.
* ctf-open.c (ctf_bufopen): Create the atoms table.
(ctf_file_close): Destroy it.
* ctf-create.c (ctf_update): Copy-and-free it on update. No longer
special-case the position of the parname string. Construct the
strtab by calling ctf_str_add_ref and ctf_str_write_strtab after the
rest of each buffer element is constructed, not via open-coding:
realloc the CTF buffer and append the strtab to it. No longer
maintain ctf_dtvstrlen. Sort the variable entry table later, after
strtab construction.
(ctf_copy_membnames): Remove: integrated into ctf_copy_{s,l,e}members.
(ctf_copy_smembers): Drop the string offset: call ctf_str_add_ref
after buffer element construction instead.
(ctf_copy_lmembers): Likewise.
(ctf_copy_emembers): Likewise.
(ctf_create): No longer maintain the ctf_dtvstrlen.
(ctf_dtd_delete): Likewise.
(ctf_dvd_delete): Likewise.
(ctf_add_generic): Likewise.
(ctf_add_enumerator): Likewise.
(ctf_add_member_offset): Likewise.
(ctf_add_variable): Likewise.
(membadd): Likewise.
* ctf-util.c (ctf_realloc): New, wrapper around realloc that aborts
if there are active ctf_str_num_refs.
(ctf_strraw): Move to ctf-string.c.
(ctf_strptr): Likewise.
* ctf-string.c: New file, strtab manipulation.
* Makefile.am (libctf_a_SOURCES): Add it.
* Makefile.in: Regenerate.
Nick Alcock