In GNU ld, -r produces a relocatable object file. This is known as relocatable linking or partial linking. This mode suppresses many passes done for an executable or shared object output (in -no-pie/-pie/-shared modes). -r, -no-pie, -pie, and -shared specify 4 different modes. The 4 options are mutually exclusive.

The relocatable output can be used for analysis and binary manipulation. Then, the output can be used to link the final executable or shared object.

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clang -pie a.o b.o

# ==>

clang -r a.o b.o -o r.o
clang -pie r.o

Let's go through various linker passes and see how relocatable linking changes the operation.

Linker passes

Find and scan input files

Only relocatable object files, archive files, and linker scripts are allowed as input. To support LTO, another kind of files may be allowed as well. Other files lead to an error.

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% ld -r a.o b.so
ld.lld: error: attempted static link of dynamic object b.so

COMDAT resolution is performed and may discard some sections and hence symbols defined relative to them.

Symbol resolution

The linker does not do special treatment for symbol versioning. @ and @@ in symbol names are left as is.

The linker does not define reserved symbols (e.g. __ehdr_start, _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_). The linker does not define encapsulation symbols (__start_$section, _stop_$section) for C identifier name sections.

When LTO is used, LTO assumes all non-local symbols may be used and avoids eliminating them.

Create synthetic sections

The linker does not create synthesized sections (.interp, .gnu.hash, .got, .plt, .comment, etc).

Map input sections and synthetic sections into output sections

GNU ld suppresses the internal linker script. There is no default mapping like .text.* to .text, .data.* to .data, etc.

One may write a linker script to map sections.

Unfortunately, the linker script language does not support matching section groups. Using a linker script is generally problematic when section groups are present in a relocatable link.

Scan relocations

This pass is skipped. The linker does not determine whether GOT/PLT/TLSDESC/TLSGD/etc are needed.

Layout and assign addresses

Output sections just get zero addresses.

Write headers

The ELF header and the section header table are created as usual. Program headers are suppressed.

Copy section contents to output and resolve relocations

The linker transforms relocations relative to input sections to relocations relative to output sections. This is similar to --emit-relocs. Addends may be changed and implicit addends may result in section content changes.

Some sections may be discarded. For a non-SHF_ALLOC section, ld.lld applies tombstone values for relocations referencing a symbol defined relative to a discarded section.

COMMON symbols are not allocated.

Shared passes

For major passes mentioned above, relocatable linking seems to skip most of them. However, there are a large number of minor features that relocatable linking shares with regular linking modes (-no-pie, -pie, -shared): --wrap, --compress-debug-sections, --build-id, -Map, etc.

A linker implementation may use a separate file to describe passes for relocatable linking, but it can easily miss the miscellaneous features.

Garbage collection

The output combines sections and loses granularity than using all input files, therefore garbage collection for the final link will be less effective.

-r --gc-sections can be used together. I added the support to ld.lld in https://reviews.llvm.org/D84131. A relocatable link does not set a default entry symbol (usually _start). One shall set up GC roots (--entry and -u) to use -r --gc-sections.

Output differences due to a relocatable link step

The following two links may produce different output.

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clang -pie a.o b.o -lz -ltinfo

clang -r a.o b.o -o r.o
clang -pie r.o -lz -ltinfo

Say both relocatable object files define .rodata._ZL7indent8 and .rodata._ZL7indent16. (The section names are due to -fdata-sections.) In the first link, the 4 input sections are combined in this order: a.o:.rodata._ZL7indent8, a.o:.rodata._ZL7indent16, b.o:.rodata._ZL7indent8, b.o:.rodata._ZL7indent16. In the second link, the relocatable link combines a.o:.rodata._ZL7indent8 and b.o:.rodata._ZL7indent8 (and the same with .rodata._ZL7indent8), so the final order appears shuffled.

This grouping effect may affect the output section size due to alignment padding.

Application

glibc

glibc provides many crt1 files: Scrt1.o, rcrt1.o, crt1.o, grcrt1.o, gcrt1.o. These files share a lot of common code but have customization. glibc uses relocatable linking to create these files, e.g.

• Scrt1.o is the relocatable link output of csu/start.os, csu/abi-note.o, and csu/init.o.
• crt1.o is the relocatable link output of csu/start.o, csu/abi-note.o, and csu/init.o.

elf/Makefile performs the following steps to build elf/ld.so:

• Create elf/libc_pic.a from libc .os files
• Create elf/dl-allobjs.os from a relocatable link of rtld .os files
• Create link map elf/librtld.map from a relocatable link of elf/dl-allobjs.os, elf/libc_pic.a, and -lgcc
• Get a list of extracted archive members (elf/librtld.mk) from elf/librtld.map and create elf/rtld-libc.a
• Create elf/librtld.os from a relocatable link of elf/dl-allobjs.os and elf/rtld-libc.a
• Create elf/ld.so from a -shared link of elf/librtld.os with the version script ld.map

Here relocatable links are used for its symbol resolution: figure out what libc components need to go into elf/ld.so. The version script ld.map is used to localize the libc symbols.

grub

grub-core/genmod.sh.in uses relocatable linking to generate modules (e.g. grub-core/reboot.module). grub-core/gensyminfo.sh.in dumps symbols into grub-core/syminfo.lst which is then used to generate a module dependency list.

Linux kernel

tools/objtool/objtool-in.o is a relocatable output linked into tools/objtool/objtool. I do not know why this step is needed.

vmlinux.o is a relocatable output for analysis (see scripts/Makefile.vmlinux_o).

• used by modules
• objtool uses vmlinux.o to perform "noinstr" (no-instrumentation) validation.

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ld.lld -m elf_x86_64 -z noexecstack -r -o vmlinux.o  --whole-archive vmlinux.a --no-whole-archive --start-group  --end-group
llvm-objcopy  -j .modinfo -O binary vmlinux.o modules.builtin.modinfo
tr '\0' '\n' < modules.builtin.modinfo | sed -n 's/^[[:alnum:]:_]*\.file=//p' | tr ' ' '\n' | uniq | sed -e 's:^:kernel/:' -e 's/$/.ko/' > modules.builti

Unsurprisingly, the ClangBuiltLinux project's contributors have identified some interesting corner cases with ld.lld. I think most issues were reported in 2019 and fixed by me.

Sanitizer internal symbolizer

Sanitizers can symbolize with an external tool llvm-symbolizer or an internal symbolizer.

The internal symbolizer uses a script compiler-rt/lib/sanitizer_common/symbolizer/scripts/build_symbolizer.sh.

• Build a portion of LLVM with -flto.
• Invoke llvm-link to link LLVM bitcode files.
• Internalize most symbols with opt -internalize -internalize-public-api-list=$list. Only __sanitizer_symbolize_* are kept as global symbols.
• Compile the bitcode into symbolizer.o.
• Inject symbolizer.o into libclang_rt*san*.a archives.

The bitcode compiles with llvm-link are an alternative to relocatable linking.

The built runtime libraries will be used by user programs. clang -fsanitize=address links libclang_rt.asan.a in --whole-archive mode, so the output will link in symbolizer.o with internal symbolizer functionality. The output may use LLVM as well and the linked LLVM may be of a different version. The internalization in symbolizer.o avoids symbol collision.

Localize symbols

The previous section mentions a trick with llvm-link. We can achieve the same effect with relocatable linking. After relocatable linking, use objcopy --keep-global-symbol to keep a few entry symbols and localize the rest symbols. The output can be distributed as a single .o file or as part of an archive file.

Both the llvm-link approach and the relocatable linking approach need extra care dealing with COMDAT groups. See COMDAT and section group#GRP_COMDAT for why all COMDAT group signatures should be kept global to avoid pitfalls.

Find more projects using relocatable linking

Many projects have complex build systems and it's difficult to know whether -r is used. I use a ld wrapper /usr/local/bin/ld to retrieve linker command lines

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#!/bin/zsh
for i in "$@"; do
  if [[ $i == -r ]]; then
    echo "$@" >> /tmp/link.log
    break
  fi
done
LD_PRELOAD=path/to/libmimalloc.so ~/Stable/bin/ld.lld --threads=8 "$@"