Some Final Breezes (a postscript)

I wrote "A Whirlwind Tutorial ..." back in July 2, 1999, almost entirely in one sitting. Having spent months figuring out the ELF executable file format, and having had all that effort actually pay off well beyond my original expectations, I wanted to write down all the paths and blind alleys I had just finished exploring.

I had created a 45-byte executable, and I wanted to share it with the world.

Over time, I've had a few omissions in the original essay pointed out to me, which I couldn't fix in the original without derailing. (And I don't feel comfortable making significant modifications to the original at this late date.) So I've put those updates in this postscript instead.


When I wrote the original essay, I was unfamiliar with the fact that the -R option to strip, which removes sections by name, allows you to name sections that do not get removed by default. With careful use of this feature of strip, both the C version and the assembly version of the executable can be reduced a bit more.

Of course, stripping arbitrary sections can easily render your executable nonfunctional. Even if the sections aren't being used, an executable can't be correctly memory-mapped if any file offset doesn't match its equivalent memory-page offset. And in any case, strip won't remove the section header table itself, nor the section header string table, so hand-coding the binary image is still necessary to get below the 200-byte mark.


After producing the seven-byte version of the program, I made the comment: "I think it's pretty safe to say that we're not going to make this program any smaller than that."

Well, actually, it could be made smaller. When Linux starts up a new executable, one of the things it does is zero out the accumulator (as well as most of the other registers). Taking advantage of this fact would have allowed me to remove the xor, bringing the program down to five bytes. However, this behavior is certainly not documented, and there's no guarantee that it can be counted on to stay that way (other than the lack of any obvious reason to change it). Anyway, such a change wouldn't have had any effect on the size of the final versions.


Of course, the biggest omission in the original document is a question I left unanswered. The following passage used to appear near the end:

... it turns out that, contrary to every expectation, the executable bit can be dropped from the p_flags field, and Linux will set it for us anyway. Why this works, I honestly don't know — maybe because Linux sees that the entry point goes to this segment? In any case, it works.

As it turns out, my guess was right — but only in a twistedly pedantic way.

I knew, of course, that Linux uses a flat-memory model, in which every selector register points to the same physical memory area. What I didn't know was that Linux memory is even flatter than that: every process (except the kernel) uses the exact same set of selectors.

When the kernel boots up, it creates the global descriptor table. One of the entries in this table is marked as being readable and executable, and another is marked as being readable and writeable. These two descriptors are then used as every program's cs and ds/es/ss registers. Changing what these selectors actually point to is then handled at the paging level, in the linear-to-physical memory translation.

Of course, memory pages have their own, independent protection flags, but they only indicate read-write vs. read-only. You can't mark a page as being executable or non-executable. (As it turns out, you never need to set more than one bit of the p_flags field. Setting either the readable or the executable bit will create a read-only page, and setting the writeable bit will create a read-write page.)

So, the actual error in my thinking was assuming that Linux was allocating selectors for every process. I couldn't see why Linux would even create an executable selector when none of the loadable segments of the ELF file were marked as being executable. But in reality, Linux had created the executable selector long before my program was even compiled.


Finally, it must be confessed that I have had to make some minor changes to some of the versions of the program in the essay, as the Linux kernel has (over the years) become less forgiving about some of the liberties I originally took.

The first time this happened, it was because the kernel stopped accepting executables that had an invalid value in the ELF header's e_phsize field. This only affect one or two of the intermediate versions of the program, and was relatively easy to fix up.

On the second occasion, one of the early versions of the assembler started crashing, specifically the one that used _start and called the libc exit() function. I had to change it to use _exit(), and added a short paragraph to the essay explaining the difference between the two functions.

The third and most serious change was when the kernel stopped allowing non-writable memory to be zero-initialized. This required changing the final versions of the program so that the p_filesz and p_memsz were equal, as well as inserting another explanatory paragraph.

(No further breakages have occurred since that one, and hopefully as 32-bit kernels become obsolete, the kernel code supporting 32-bit executables will remain as-is for the foreseeable future.)

 

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Tiny
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Brian Raiter