Subject: Re: violating function pointer signature

From: Florian Weimer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:59:29 +0100

* Peter Zijlstra:

> I think that as long as the function is completely empty (it never
> touches any of the arguments) this should work in practise.
>
> That is:
>
>   void tp_nop_func(void) { }
>
> can be used as an argument to any function pointer that has a void
> return. In fact, I already do that, grep for __static_call_nop().

You can pass it as a function parameter, but in general, you cannot
call the function with a different prototype.  Even trivial
differences such as variadic vs non-variadic prototypes matter.

The default Linux calling conventions are all of the cdecl family,
where the caller pops the argument off the stack.  You didn't quote
enough to context to tell whether other calling conventions matter in
your case.

> I'm not sure what the LLVM-CFI crud makes of it, but that's their
> problem.

LTO can cause problems as well, particularly with whole-program
optimization.