[vbox-dev] VBoxRT.so broken TEXTRELs since 4.3.16

[Frank Mehnert]

Hi Anna,

On Friday 13 February 2015 11:56:48 Anna Fischer wrote:
> > An: vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
> > Betreff: Re: [vbox-dev] VBoxRT.so broken TEXTRELs since 4.3.16
> > 
> > Hi Anna,
> > 
> > On Friday 13 February 2015 09:31:23 Anna Fischer wrote:
> > > We are running a hardened Gentoo with GRSecurity enabled. We have
> > > found out that since VBOX 4.3.16 there is a problem with
> > > /usr/lib64/virtualbox/VBoxRT.so which seems to have TEXTREL markings
> > > and therefore access to it is blocked by GRSec. We have previously run
> > > 4.3.12 and on that version, this problem has not been present. We have
> > > upgraded to
> > > 4.3.20 by now but the problem still persists. Has anyone ever
> > > experienced this before?
> > > 
> > > [...]
> > 
> > may I ask which package you are using? Exact package name and where did
> > you download it?
> 
> We use the standard Gentoo VBOX 4.3.20 package:
> http://packages.gentoo.org/package/app-emulation/virtualbox
> 
> The source comes from
> http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.20/VirtualBox-4.3.20.tar.bz2
> 
> Plus Gentoo specific patches are applied which you can find here:
> 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~polynomial-c/virtualbox/patchsets/virtualbox-4.3.16-p
> atches-01.tar.xz

I'm quite sure the -nopie compiler switch of the Gentoo patches is responsible
for these TEXTRELs. I didn't find such TEXTRELs in our official packages which
you find on www.virtualbox.org. I checked the 64-bit Linux universal .run
installer as well as our latest Ubuntu package.

050_virtualbox-4.3.14-nopie.patch from the Gentoo patches adds -nopie. That
option prevents generating of position-independent code, therefore the .text
sections needs to be patched.

I propose you ask the Gentoo folks why they add this parameter to gcc.

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
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