The DT_RELR relocation is a relatively new relocation encoding designed
to achieve space-efficient relative relocations in PIE programs.
The description of the format is available here:
https://groups.google.com/g/generic-abi/c/bX460iggiKg/m/Pi9aSwwABgAJ
It works by using a bitmap to store the offsets which need to be
relocated. Even entries are *address* entries: they contain an address
(relative to the base of the executable) which needs to be relocated.
Subsequent even entries are *bitmap* entries: "1" bits encode offsets
(in word size increments) relative to the last address entry which need
to be relocated.
This is in contrast to the REL/RELA format, where each entry takes up
2/3 machine words. Certain kinds of relocations store useful data in
that space (like the name of the referenced symbol), so not everything
can be encoded in this format. But as position-independent executables
and shared libraries tend to have a lot of relative relocations, a
specialized encoding for them absolutely makes sense.
The authors of the format suggest an overall 5-20% reduction in the file
size of various programs. Due to our extensive use of dynamic linking
and us not stripping debug info, relative relocations don't make up such
a large portion of the binary's size, so the measurements will tend to
skew to the lower side of the spectrum.
The following measurements were made with the x86-64 Clang toolchain:
- The kernel contains 290989 relocations. Enabling RELR decreased its
size from 30 MiB to 23 MiB.
- LibUnicodeData contains 190262 relocations, almost all of them
relative. Its file size changed from 17 MiB to 13 MiB.
- /bin/WebContent contains 1300 relocations, 66% of which are relative
relocations. With RELR, its size changed from 832 KiB to 812 KiB.
This change was inspired by the following blog post:
https://maskray.me/blog/2021-10-31-relative-relocations-and-relr
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